As police sketch artists are doubtless aware, it is notoriously difficult to construct English phrases that will convey an exact description of a person’s physical appearance, exact enough that the hearer will form a roughly accurate mental image of the person described. When pressed, we generally try to find comparisons with well-known faces: “His face was . . . well . . . he looked a lot like Jack Nicholson, but with a bigger nose and curly red hair!”
But I don’t know if this is a deficiency of English alone, or of all or most human languages. It is a very curious failing, considering the importance of physical appearance in practically all human cultures.
The same can be said of smell. I remember from one of Garrison Keillor’s stories, “Smell is the key to memory.” So it is. But have you ever tried to describe a smell to another person, without comparing it to another smell the hearer might recognize? Perhaps if dogs or cats were to evolve into sentient language-using beings, their languages would include rich and technical vocabularies to describe smells. But English doesn’t. And, even to us humans, smell is important enough to deserve more than this!
Does anybody know of any foreign languages that have better vocabularies than English for describing faces, or smells?
I’ll bite.
FACES: For identification purposes a good description of a face is important. But it is only one of several factors included in recognition. Body posture, gait and context are important. English provides plently of descriptions for eye color & shape; nose size and shape; mouth/lip size, ear size & type of lobes; any facial adornments such as nose/ear ring, safety pins, unibrows, etc. Note also that different cultures focus on different features (Check This out)
The problem with descriptions is that they often lack any subjective assessment of “character.” If you watch the news, you’ll get a physical (joke) description including height, hair, eyes & skin; but they never tell you any useful idiosyncrasies of the perp like he smell of tobacco, he had a lisp, he had a limp, acne, hairy back, etc.
SMELLS: Same concept as faces. Plenty of good words, limits only on context and eloquence of possibly traumatized memory.
I would also suggest that senses have pretty much their own organs for a reason, and that is because in our economy of construction we have found it useful for our survival purposes to limit it to 5 (or 6). You just can’t describe “Red” to a blind person, nor of the delightful call of the raven to a deaf person. The reason is that, with the exception of smell/taste and a good chest-rumbling bass, there is no sensory overlap.
To describe what your senses have sensed, the audience needs a common reference like Jack Nicholson or pot smoke from which to deviate.
Languages DO vary, of course, when it comes to details about the physical world. Eskimos and snow is a good example.
I’ve always found it interesting that you can remember smells. For some reason my brain (ponderer of all things great and small) has a hard time making sense of how it’s possible to remember smells.
It seems kind of surreal and freaky to me.
Posted by Matchka:
Ermm . . . are you sure about that? I think Cecil did a column debunking the myth that Inuit languages have a vast technical vocabulary for different kinds of snow.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_297.html
Damn kiddies, making them change one of Cecil’s best lines. “Freaking,” my arse.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere at some time that as humans lost the need for an acute sense of smell the part of the brain that deals with smelling was gradually overrun by memory functions. Apparently the conversion is not yet completed, hence the strong association between smells and memory.