Olfactory Language Requires an Integrative and Interdisciplinary Approach

Published on March 21, 2021

Olfaction was poignantly dubbed the ‘mute sense’ by Diane Ackerman [1], and it is regularly claimed that modern and ancient languages lack resources to communicate about smells [2]. In a recent article [3], I argued that such conclusions are untenable in the face of emerging crosscultural evidence: numerous languages around the world have sizeable lexicons for expressing smell qualities; smell can be encoded in grammar; smell talk is more frequent in some cultures; and under experimental conditions, naming of odors can be comparable with naming of visual entities.

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