An odour lexicon: A group of nomadic hunter-gatherers in Thailand have multiple words for smells
"A sweet, flowery and oriental composition of scents with jasmine and May rose absolute" – this is how a well-known cosmetics manufacturer describes one of its most successful women's perfumes. A very sophisticated means of expression, one might think. Far from it: Western languages appear to lack vocabulary devoted to express the variety of existing smells. They rely on metaphors and similes. According to linguists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, however, there are languages that have a specific vocabulary for odours. The Maniq, a group of hunter-gatherers in southern Thailand, can describe smells using at least 15 different abstract expressions. They categorise odours according to their pleasantness and dangerousness. The linguists' results show that human language is perfectly capable of expressing the variety of smells in our environment. This probably reflects how important a sense of smell was for survival over the course...