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Transcript Episode 37: Smell words, both real and invented

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 37: Smell words, both real and invented. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 37 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about language and smell. But first, we’re heading into our November anniversary!

Gretchen: Yay! Three whole years of Lingthusiasm. In celebration of that we are – as we have done for all our anniversaries – we are trying to help more people than ever find the linguistics enthusiasm that we know and love. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth. This year, we’ve thought of something to help talk about it.

Lauren: We want to help people find Lingthusiasm by sharing with them what makes linguistics so great. We’re asking you to share a thing that you’ve learnt from Lingthusiasm over the first three years of episodes.

Gretchen: If there’s a fun fact, or a story, or an anecdote that you find yourself retelling or mentioning to people, that would be a great thing to post on social media or to tell someone about, “Hey, there’s this podcast that’s cool! Here’s something I learned from it.” It’s also really helpful to us because, Lauren, you and I have been doing linguistics for quite a while and we sometimes forget which things aren’t new to us but are actually new and exciting to other people. Help us remember which things are new and exciting for you to learn about!

Lauren: If you can’t think of one in particular, because there’re so many great things that you’ve learnt on the show, stay tuned to our social media. We’ll be retweeting and sharing other people’s facts so you can get some ling-spiration.

Gretchen: You can also reshare anybody else’s facts that you would like to co-sign. We’ve noticed that some of our biggest growths in listenerships have been from other people pointing out interesting things that they’ve learned recently. We thought we’d try to do that more formally for the anniversary. Share something interesting you’ve learned, something you find yourself retelling to other people, and other people will realise this is where they can get more stuff like that.

Lauren: I love every anniversary we come back and encourage people to share their lingthusiasm, because every year we have been growing. We have been reaching new ears. Maybe you are new ears since our last anniversary. Maybe you have been with us since Episode 1. We’re always excited to encourage new people to discover that linguistics is fun and interesting and relevant to their everyday life.

Gretchen: We also have another new Patreon bonus episode. This one is about surnames. Listen to this and support the show on Patreon. You can also share your stories about where your surname comes from and any linguistically interesting things that happened to you because of your surname.

Lauren: We talk about the origins of “McCulloch” and “Gawne” in that episode. We also have over 30 bonus episodes for you to listen to. That’s almost half the number of shows. If you’ve listened to the whole main episode back catalogue, there’s almost as many episodes again waiting for you over at the Patreon.

Gretchen: There’s your solution for “Oh, no! I’ve listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes. What do I do now?” The answer is – go listen on Patreon. There’re lots of things for you still to listen to. Thank you if you’ve been supporting us on Patreon already.

Lauren: You help us keep the show ad-free and ticking along. We also have exciting new Lingthusiasm merch for you.

Gretchen: By popular demand, you can now get lingthusiastic socks!

Lauren: I’m very excited about the socks.

Gretchen: All three of our prints – the International Phonetic Alphabet, the tree structure diagrams, and the esoteric Unicode symbols – are now also available on socks, in addition to the scarves, and ties, and mugs that they were previously available on.

Lauren: We have multiple patterns. We have multiple colours. You can buy them along with all of our existing merchandise. We also have greeting cards that say “thanks” and “congrats” in IPA as well as some other greetings.

Gretchen: If there’re any linguists that you need to thank or congratulate as the year winds to a close, that is something you can now do. Plus, and get this – I’m really excited about this – we have water bottles that have the glottal symbols from the IPA on them. They are glottal bottles. I’m so pleased.

Lauren: You can get your nice glottal bottles for your water. Or it’s even more satisfying if you’re the kind of the person who says “water” with a glottal stop in the middle of “water.”

Gretchen: Or “bottle” with a glottal stop there too. They have the glottal stop, the glottal fricative, and the voiced glottal fricative. People won’t know that’s what they are until you tell them. I’m so pleased!

Lauren: Finally, we have new T-shirts and mugs that say, “Linguistic correctness is just a lie by big grammar to sell you more grammars.”

Gretchen: To check out the full set of Lingthusiasm merch, which there’s quite a lot of at this point, go to lingthusiasm.com/merch. It makes a great gift for the linguist or linguistics enthusiast in your life.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, what is your favourite smell?

Gretchen: Ooh, there are so many good smells. I really like the smell of rose. I also really like the smell of almond. It depends on whether you’re talking about to wear or to eat. I also really like spicy scents.

Lauren: Almonds as in fresh almonds or almond blossoms?

Gretchen: No, almond extract that you bake with.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Like marzipan.

Gretchen: Well, yeah. Or like amaretto, or vanilla extract but almond. It’s so good. I could eat/smell that forever. What’s your favourite smell?

Lauren: This one always slightly startles people in the northern hemisphere, but I love the smell of freshly cut grass because it reminds me of Christmas, which I think says a lot about how frequently my family ever got around to mowing the lawn.

Gretchen: I mean, I agree. The smell of freshly cut grass is really good. I didn’t think of that one. There’s also the smell of the earth when it rains. But it doesn’t really remind me of Christmas. The smell of new-fallen snow reminds me of Christmas – also a great smell.

Lauren: Hmm, not a smell that I know or identify as readily.

Gretchen: Oh, it’s a very distinct smell. The smell of crisping leaves in the fall – also very good smell.

Lauren: We have not as many of them, but we have a particular kind of lemon gum tree in Australia that always smells really amazing on campus just before the academic year starts in February/March. Whenever I smell that smell, I get really excited because it means classes are gonna start soon, we’re gonna have students back on campus, and it reminds me of undergrad days and starting university. For me, smells are often really linked – I mean, clearly, if two of my smells are really linked to particular times and places for me.

Gretchen: Yeah. I was just kind of looking around my house thinking, “What smells good around here?” Then, when you start getting the time and place, I’m like, “Oh, yeah. That leaf smell in the fall is also very back to school for me,” or the distinct smell of each season, like the spring smell, when everything is melting – also a nice smell.

Lauren: It says a lot about English that we have to be like “the smell of spring” or “the smell of freshly mown grass” or “freshly fallen snow.” We kind of just don’t have the best vocabulary for talking about smells – other than referring to the thing that they relate to.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I’m thinking of this because when you asked me, “What’s your favourite smell?” I was like “Oh!” I have a ready answer to what’s my favourite colour, but I don’t have a ready answer to what’s my favourite smell because it’s not something that we think about in terms of the abstract smell-ness of it. I’m not like, “Oh, my favourite colour is the colour of pomegranates” or something because I can actually just name that colour.

Lauren: It would be funny, though, if you’re like, “My favourite colour is the red of strawberries and not the red of cherries.”

Gretchen: Exactly! Or, “The orange-y red of a sunset, but not a neon light, but like the sunset.” We do that for smell. That’s how we talk about smell.

Lauren: There’s a long literature on the way that we talk about smell and that smell is maybe not as complicated as the other senses. But in a lot of ways, that’s a very culturally driven thing. In fact, as we’ll talk about in this episode, there are other cultures where scent is a lot more a part of the language and it makes it a lot easier to talk about it.

Gretchen: Is this an English thing, or a European languages thing, or what’s the...?

Lauren: It seems to be one of those weird European things where, if we actually look at a wider diversity of the world’s languages, things are a lot more interesting. When I say “we,” I mean a group of linguists, and particularly Asifa Majid, who works on the relationship between language and smell.

Gretchen: We’re gonna be citing Asifa Majid a lot in this episode. Go follow her on Twitter.

Lauren: All of her work is really great. I mean, there were some broad studies around smell, so we know that experts tend to be better than novices at smelling smells.

Gretchen: How does one become a smell expert? Is this a thing I can do?

Lauren: If you are a perfumer, or if you work with wine. Although, apparently, if you work in a particular industry, you might be very good at smelling wine, but it doesn’t make your ability to smell flowers necessarily any better.

Gretchen: Oh, really? This is very domain-specific smell expertise – “smexpertise"?

Lauren: “Smellspertise.”

Gretchen: “Smellspertise.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I would sign up for this job. Like, “Oh, I get to drink a lot of wine and smell it. I get to eat a lot of chocolate and smell it.”

Lauren: I think it’s one of those jobs that’s great in theory and then when you’ve smelled 500 chocolates...

Gretchen: That’s true. It’s probably like video game tester, where you’re like, “Actually, this is not as fun as what I signed up for.”

Lauren: I think being a linguist is as fun as I signed up for, so maybe there’s some people who are super enthusiastic about smelling chocolate.

Gretchen: I’ll stay being a linguist and just eat chocolate in my spare time. Experts are better than novices, and pollution can affect the way we perceive smells.

Lauren: Yeah. Maybe part of why you’re not as sensitive to smell as – if you’re in an olfactorily noisy environment. However, there was a study that looked at perfumers who work in perfume shops – you know how you walk into a perfume store or a cosmetics store and it’s like –

Gretchen: This wall of perfume smell.

Lauren: Yeah. That doesn’t seem to affect people in that workplace. They can kind of deal with that.

Gretchen: Oh, so it becomes the kind of white noise of smell in their background, and then they can distinguish between perfume smell still.

Lauren: Yeah. Which makes you realise just how clever human brains are.

Gretchen: That’s good! Because if I make cookies or something, first, my apartment just smells like cookies, but then afterwards, if I leave and come back, I’m like, “Oh, it still smells like cookies here.” But if I stay in there, I stop noticing it.

Lauren: Then, of course, there are another group of people who are relatively good compared to the population at discerning smells and they are people who have odour- colour synaesthesia.

Gretchen: Ooh! I have other synaesthesias but not odour-colour.

Lauren: Yeah, we’ve talked about synaesthesia a bit in other episodes. At its most basic it’s where your brain takes in one sensory bit of information but also processes it as though it’s another bit of sensory information. There are people who, when they smell things, register it as a particular colour.

Gretchen: Right. I guess this kind of makes sense to me because I have grapheme-colour synaesthesia, so when I see particular letters or numbers, I also see colours associated with them. I can see how one could have smells associated with colours, but I think for me it would just be like, “I’m picturing the thing that it smells like,” and that’s probably not actually what the synaesthesia is involved.

Lauren: They studied people who have this synaesthesia compared to regular old sniffers like me and found that they were more consistent and accurate at naming odours.

Gretchen: Interesting! Okay. Cool. Let’s talk about some of these languages that actually do have more odour terms than English does.

Lauren: Yeah. Obviously, synaesthesia is something that affects people randomly in the population. Then, there are these cultures in which there are far more words and terms for talking about smell. That seems to have implications as well for how smell is used in these languages.

Gretchen: Right. One of these languages is Tepehua. Specifically, Huehuetla Tepehua, which I hope I’m pronouncing right but I’m not completely sure. This is a language spoken in the state Hidalgo in the eastern Sierra Madre in the central Gulf Coast region of Mexico – named after the town where it’s spoken. It’s related to some other languages that are spoken around there. This is a really interesting paper with Asifa Majid and some people who work on this language in particular. They did an elicitation study on particular scents. They found 23 specific groups of scent words in this language. They catalogued them according to what types of things they correspond to. They’re often smells you can kinda recognise but that in English we don’t have specific names for those specific smells.

Lauren: Awesome. Can we hear some of these smell groups?

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s a really interesting list because some of them are really delightful and some of them are really bad, and there’s really not much in between. Group Number 1, which is /ʔuli/ or /k’uli/ or /sk’uli/ – there’re all various different versions of that sound – which is a delicious smell like flowers, or perfume, or floral, citrus. It isn’t just specifically a floral scent. It has this sort of positive connotation and this sort of rich, beautiful odour. But in contrast, there’s another smell group, which is Number 6, which is a different kind of delicious odour, and this is /kan/ or /kani/ or /kanini/. This is the delicious and beautiful odour which might smell like clove, or might be kind of fruity, or might be describing the delicious odour of a free-range chicken that eats corn instead of chicken feed.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: I think this one may be a little bit more food-like.

Lauren: Bit more savoury.

Gretchen: Yeah! They’re both really good. There’s another one, /k’us/, which is also a beautiful odour, but a slightly different beautiful odour. Again, English just doesn’t have the vocabulary for this. In contrast, there’s this Group 10, which is /ɬkih/, or /sʔeh/, or /ʃʔeh/, which is a delicious savoury odour like when shrimp or mushrooms are boiling, the smell of coffee or recently wet earth, incense, food, honey or sugar cooking, frying meat, beans, but sometimes also used for an unpleasant smell like skunk, human farts, burning plastic, or burning garbage. This one is a little bit more controversial.

Lauren: Hmm, wow. That one definitely covers a gamut.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Asifa also did some work with researchers who work on Cha’palaa, which is a language of Ecuador in the Barbacoan family. Similarly, they found these smell terms that kind of have a meaning that we know immediately as a group – and some similar ones. There’s one for things that are sweet-smelling or perfume, which is “pindyu,” and then “andyu” is for fragrant and good food – and like another positive term. The one that really caught me is the smell “chijdyu,” which is the smell of burning hair.

Gretchen: Oh, wow. That was what this /ʃʔeh/ smell can also be burning plastic or burning hair, burning feathers, burning bones.

Lauren: It’s one of those smells that as soon as you smell it you just know if you’ve ever accidentally put your hair too close to a hair dryer or near a fire. We don’t have a good word for it. We have the word “the smell of burning hair.” It’s not that we can’t smell it and we can’t describe it. It’s just that we literally use the word “hair” and “burning” to describe it. Whereas, these words don’t necessarily directly relate to those words.

Gretchen: It’s like the difference between saying “the colour of strawberries” and “red.” You can still talk about the colour of strawberries but you don’t have a specific cover term that covers strawberries, and tomatoes, and apples, and fire engines, and these kinds of things.

Lauren: The really nifty thing about this is that they not only recorded the specific smell vocabulary items – there’s about 14 so far recorded for Cha’palaa – but they also turn up more frequently in narratives than descriptions of smells in English in similar narratives.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s really neat. I also really enjoyed how sometimes they draw connections between smells that I wouldn’t have thought of as related. Then, when you say that, I’m like, “Oh, yeah. These are related.” This kind of aromatic smell or also painful smell, which is /ɬkak/ or /ɬkakak/ in Tepehua, is a spicy or strong smell like peppermint, eucalyptus, lime – like calcium hydroxide, not like a lime citrus. One of the descriptions is it’s so spicy or strong that it’ll make you sneeze. It’s kind of grouping together something that I wouldn’t necessarily have immediately grouped together. This is something else that I really enjoyed about this Tepehua paper is that they also describe the methodology for how they went about getting this list of smells. Because, of course, “Can you translate these English words?” is not necessarily a good way of doing smells in particular because English doesn’t have the word to translate necessarily. Instead, they used these tools called “Sniffin’ Sticks.” There’s no G there. It’s “Sniffin’ Sticks.”

Lauren: The apostrophe there is very important.

Gretchen: Of course, when I looked it up on the website, like, “What are Sniffin’ Sticks?”

Lauren: I mean, we got really excited. We were like, “Should we have practiced this methodology ourselves? Should we get some of these and smell them?”

Gretchen: Yeah! Sniffin’ Sticks, apparently, are these little plastic tubes that look kind of like a marker, and you think maybe of those scented markers that maybe you had when you were a kid. Did you have those?

Lauren: We had those. But this is like those but more science.

Gretchen: Those but science, because they don’t smell like artificial cherry. They smell like real smells – high quality smells – and not always pleasant smells because you don’t just want a whole bunch of fake fruits. You want a bigger range.

Lauren: They also smell really consistently across all of the sticks and they have the same intensity of smell.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because I was thinking, well, maybe instead of buying the Sniffin’ Sticks for €200 from this website, maybe I could just make my own.

Lauren: This is where the plan came to a quick end.

Gretchen: It was like, “Maybe we should get some Sniffin’ Sticks, Lauren.” And then it was €200. Later, “Maybe we’re not gonna get Sniffin’ Sticks.” They have very specific flavours. Instead of buying some essential oils and dabbing them on a bit of cloth or something, these are all very controlled. They’re for things sometimes that don’t necessarily have an essential oil associated with them. Some of the flavours include – would you like a list of flavours?

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: Okay. Orange.

Lauren: Yum.

Gretchen: Leather.

Lauren: Hmm.

Gretchen: Cinnamon.

Lauren: Hmm.

Gretchen: Peppermint.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: Banana.

Lauren: Hmm.

Gretchen: Lemon.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Liquorice.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Turpentine.

Lauren: Ooh... Actually, no. My mom used to do oil painting, so I’m very weirdly nostalgic about turpentine.

Gretchen: Okay. Garlic.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: Coffee.

Lauren: Lovely.

Gretchen: Apple.

Lauren: Great.

Gretchen: Clove, pineapple, rose, fish.

Lauren: Gahhh.

Gretchen: This is the lunchroom smell. Flower in general. Like, I don’t know what the difference is between that and these specific flowers but, okay. Pear, like the fruit.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Cola. I guess like Coca-Cola or something? Lilac, /lɑɪlɑk/ – how do people say this word? I’ve been corrected on this word before.

Lauren: I say /lɑɪlæk/.

Gretchen: I say /lɑɪlɑk/. It’s okay. Grapefruit, grass – there’s our freshly cut grass smell – raspberry, honey, ginger, coconut, lavender, melon, peach, mushrooms, smoked meat.

Lauren: Mmm.

Gretchen: There’s your savoury smells. Chocolate, onion, menthol, soy sauce, sesame oil, caramel –

Lauren: Yum.

Gretchen: – and eucalyptus.

Lauren: What an emotional rollercoaster.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s a really interesting list. They’re fairly pleasant smells. Some of the smells that I was seeing in the list of smells from different languages were things like the odour of sweat, or fermentation, or disgusting odour like rotting meat. They don’t seem to be forcing people in the lab to smell skunk or rotting meat, which I think is very nice of them.

Lauren: Very kind.

Gretchen: There are some more savoury smells like smoked meat, and leather, and sesame oil, and stuff like that.

Lauren: Obviously, the Sniffin’ Sticks have a lot of advantages in terms of the consistency, and they’re portable and can be shared very easily. Apparently, they last for at least a year, according to the manufacturer.

Gretchen: So, it’s more efficient than just getting a slice of lemon and putting it in a jar.

Lauren: Well, you say that, but there’s another smell research paper that I read – and I have a summary of it on my blog from a few years ago, I’ll link to it – but they were looking at whether people had an association between particular odours and colours, even if they weren’t people who had synaesthesia. To do this, they looked at English speakers and they looked at speakers of Jahai, which is a language on the Malaysian peninsula that does have a really rich smell lexicon, to do this study, because they were looking at things like coffee and banana and coconut that both groups might recognise, but they were also looking at smells that only each group might recognise. They had peanut butter for the English speakers and galangal, which is a really nice aromatic that would be familiar to the Jahai speakers but not the English speakers. They put them in plastic bottles with little spray things on top, like you use for cleaning, and would just kind of spray the air from the bottle at people.

Gretchen: Waft some smell. I mean, okay. I guess this works if you don’t have €200 to buy some Sniffin’ Sticks, you can get a lemon and put it in an empty spray bottle and spritz it.

Lauren: They did this to look at whether people associated particular colours with smells. When they recognised it, they would if it was – like for the smell of coffee, they would think of brown and for the smell of banana, they would think of yellow. Again, kind of showing that our ability to think about smells is tied to the objects that we’re smelling more than the smells independently. Whereas, Jahai speakers were much better at identifying smells. They use smell a lot. They’re hunter- gatherers. It’s much more part of their daily life skill set.

Gretchen: Have a very rich smell vocabulary.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: I noticed on the Sniffin’ Sticks website, which again I can’t quite get over, but they actually have a smell training kit.

Lauren: Oh, excellent!

Gretchen: Which contains four vials smelling like lemon, rose, eucalyptus, and clove. I don’t know why they picked those particular ones. I just wanna read you this description because it’s really good. “The different sticks contain odorants from everyday life, which can enlarge your sense of smell. Will be delivered in a box with cotton hand gloves. The idea that our sense of smell can be improved via training might at first seem strange, but the more you think about it the more it makes sense. Going to the gym and lifting weights can improve muscle mass and tone and practicing the guitar regularly will hopefully improve proficiency, so will spending time sniffing odours. Estimated results starting after six to nine months.” Of regularly sniffing these plastic vials.

Lauren: What? I mean, in that time you could just learn to speak Jahai.

Gretchen: You know, that one’s only €49. I’m tempted, but I think maybe I’ll pass. If anyone has given yourself a course in smell training, please let us know how it goes. You can enrol in a wine tasting course for a similar amount of price, I feel like. Lauren, you’re the one that suggested that we do an episode about smell. How did you get into smell?

Lauren: I mean, I’m always been a fan of our sniffers’ work – I think is probably the very first reason that I get really excited about language and smell. I got an opportunity to apply all the feelings that I have about scent in language when I wrote a constructed language for P. M. Freestone’s Shadowscent fantasy series, which has been so much fun.

Gretchen: So, there’s a book that has a conlang in it, and you made the conlang?

Lauren: Correct.

Gretchen: Like, a smell conlang.

Lauren: Shadowscent is set in a world that has a lot more focus on scent. P. M. Freestone is one of those people that has, I think, a very acute sense of smell. I think because smell has been so central for her life, a lot of this story is set around scent. Even when the story is not set around it, the writing is so beautifully evocative of smell in a way that a lot of English language writing isn’t.

Gretchen: She came calling and said, “Hey, can you help me with the language aspects of this book”?

Lauren: Yes. I got involved early enough that I also got to make sure that all the characters and the place names were internally consistent with the language.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah!

Lauren: Once you start doing linguistics, it can sometimes be – I refer to this as the “Khaleesi” problem. When George R.R. Martin wrote Game of Thrones, the word “Khaleesi” – it’s spelt K-H-A-L-E-E-S-I. But the problem is, English speakers say E-E and I the same way. If you actually listen to Dothraki, the language from Game of Thrones, it’s pronounced /xəlɛɪsi/. But no English speaker pronounces it that way.

Gretchen: Right. English speakers who give their kids the name “Khaleesi,” they don’t call them /xəlɛɪsi/.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: You end up having to kind of reverse engineer a weird system for the language if you have somebody get involved for the conlang too late. Whereas, if you do it really early, then you can make sure that all the character names are internally consistent.

Lauren: Yeah. David J. Peterson talks about the challenges of – and the complexity of – working with a series that was already multiple books in. I’ll link to some of that. I had the luxury of coming in early and creating the language so that it fit the place names and the people names that also could be involved in creating the full language as well.

Gretchen: I’ve read this book because it’s available in the UK now. Even though it isn’t out in North America, you were able to send me a copy because it’s coming out this month – next month?

Lauren: In November.

Gretchen: Because it’s coming out in November. I read it and I was expecting – because you were talking about the language, like, “Oh, every other page is gonna have full paragraphs of this language! I’m gonna have to do a lot of decoding in order to do this," which I was excited about, but also a bit nervous about.

Lauren: I feel like I would say I’m sorry to disappoint you, but actually, the book is such a great romp that we didn’t need to be held down with linguistic puzzles on every other page.

Gretchen: I mean, I enjoyed the story a lot. Clearly, there’s gotta be a lot of work that you put in behind the scenes that you don’t actually get to see in the pages of the book.

Lauren: The glacier is always a good metaphor for this kind of work where there’s an incredibly large amount of figuring out the mechanics of the language that happen behind the scenes. We have a dictionary. I have the basics of the grammar. Then, you have this tiny bit at the top that you actually see come through in the book.

Gretchen: Can you tell us – because I think I speak for everybody here that your average Lingthusiasm listener is also gonna be more interested in the language aspects than the average reader might be – can you tell us more about what’s actually in this language that doesn’t necessarily appear in the pages?

Lauren: Sure. There’s a couple of translational tidbits in Volume 1 of Shadowscent. But I was interested in creating a language that was really true to the world that it was spoken in. Knowing about this work with Cha’palaa and Jahai, and these languages that have much more of a focus on scent than English does, I wanted to do justice to it. There are two schools of thought when you create a language. There’s the people who try and strive for natural languages that make as much sense within what we know about what human languages do. Then, there are people who make artificial languages that deliberately go against what we know human languages can do. For a lot of what I did with the language of Aramteskan, which is the language in the books, is a lot of it fits with what we know about human languages. It has a set of sounds that you would expect to see in a possible human language. It has a lot of grammatical features that are very exciting because I want it to be a bit more playful and create a language that doesn’t really exist when we look at what happens with smell in the world’s languages.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s so interesting! The sounds are pretty vanilla, to use a scent metaphor, but the words for smell – like when we talked about these other languages that have these rich inventories of words for smell – it’s got a lot of these. It also does some stuff that natural languages, as far as we know, don’t do?

Lauren: Yes. One thing is I just made sure that there were lots of verbs for “to smell.” Because in English was have – you can “smell,” you can “sniff,” but there’s not a really rich vocabulary.

Gretchen: You can “olfact.”

Lauren: “To olfact.” I created a whole bunch of different verbs. There’s only one verb for “to move.” You don’t “run.” You don’t “walk.” You don’t “stroll.” You just move. That’s not very exciting. But I have verbs for “to smell something slowly for a long time,” “to smell something by wafting it,” “to accidentally smell something and then discover that it’s disgusting and it’s too late,” which I feel like is a feeling we’ve all had before, “to smell something that you can remember but you can’t immediately place.”

Gretchen: Ooh! Like the tip of tongue phenomenon, but the tip of the nose phenomenon.

Lauren: Yeah. “To smell something with great enthusiasm.”

Gretchen: This is delightful.

Lauren: I’m always expanding. If there is any form of “to smell,” I can create a word for it.

Gretchen: Hmm, okay. I’ll have to put my thinking cap on.

Lauren: If you have any particular forms of smelling, I’m always – it’s one of those areas of vocabulary that I’m just adding to all the time.

Gretchen: What about “to smell something and you’re not sure if it’s disgusting or not”? You’re like, “Maybe that’s a good smell. Maybe that’s a bad smell.” You’re just kind of smelling it experimentally.

Lauren: Hmm, yeah. You know what? I’m gonna add that.

Gretchen: Because I was thinking about this from our list when we were looking through the things from other languages and some of the words really kind of bordered on “is this disgusting or not?”

Lauren: It’s one of those things where some people find the smell of durian or other really pungent fruit really pleasant and other people don’t. Some people have this moment of like, “Ugh! I don’t know!” That’s a really great one. I’m gonna add that to the language.

Gretchen: Excellent. I feel so proud I had a contribution.

Lauren: Then, one of the other things that I did is we talked a lot about how all of our words for smells are like, “It smells like burned hair,” or “It smells like an orange.” As many of the vocabulary items as I could in the language are “the smell.” The basic vocabulary item is “the smell of oranges.” Then, you have to change that word to come up with “the thing that smells like oranges.”

Gretchen: Oh, wow! Okay. That’s really interesting. If you wanna talk about actual oranges, you have to say, “the thing that smells like oranges.”

Lauren: Yes. Flipping the whole thing on its head.

Gretchen: That’s great! It’s like how some languages, their adjectives have the shapes of verbs. Whereas, in other languages their adjectives are a little more like nouns or something. This is like everything is scent-derived as much as possible. Do you want to talk about the scent evidential? In a previous episode, we talked about how languages have different strategies for introducing sources of knowledge. You can say, “I witnessed this myself,” “I heard it second-hand,” “I deduced it from the available evidence.” This seems like a really good place to introduce some sort of smell thing, right?

Lauren: You will be unsurprised to know, given that evidentiality is something I have worked on for a long time and thought about for a long time, I couldn’t resist putting grammatical evidentiality into this language.

Gretchen: For smell.

Lauren: But Aramteskan has an evidential system that does not exist, that we know of, in any human language.

Gretchen: Yes! Thank you for not disappointing me.

Lauren: A lot of human languages will have like, “I know because I sense this using any of my senses,” or “I know this because I saw it,” and then they might have another form that is used for all the other senses. In Aramteskan, we have “I know this because I smelt it,” or “I know this because I used one of my other senses, which aren’t as important or interesting.” This divide is definitely not – I mean, I don’t think there’s any language we’ve come across so far that has a specific grammatical evidential just for smell, let alone one that has one for smell and prioritises it over all the other senses.

Gretchen: This is delightful. Even though this is not actually in the pages of the book, you can kind of feel this additional attention to sense and smell kind of permeating the manuscript – or wafting from it.

Lauren: Yes. As well as the lovely wafting scent of printed books, if you buy the paper version.

Gretchen: That’s true. There is that smell. Maybe there’s a language that has a better word for that. Maybe they could print it with those smell marker Sniffin’ Sticks and then you could scratch and sniff the entire book. Have you thought about suggesting this to P. M. Freestone?

Lauren: Ah, it would be so amazing.

Gretchen: It would be really expensive, I’m sure. Pay €200, get this scratch-and-sniff version of Shadowscent. This is not available. I’m making this up. But maybe this is something you could get.

Lauren: It would be so lovely. Even if you have to DIY the smell environment, Shadowscent: The Darkest Bloom, as it’s known in the UK, is out there now. Shadowscent, as it’s known in the US, is out November 5. It has a lovely hardback and a map in it in the US edition. That’s gonna be super fancy. Book 2 will be out in 2020, I believe.

Gretchen: Cool. I’m looking forward to Book 2. Yeah, maybe I’ll just have to kind of DIY my own scent experience for the book.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book is called Because Internet. It makes a great gift for anybody who might be interested in internet language in your life. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include surnames, metaphors, and a Q&A with me about Because Internet, if you wanna know behind the scenes how it was to write. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life – especially this month, if you want to say something interesting that you enjoy sharing from a Lingthusiasm episode, and then we can share it with other people, and people can discover the podcast that way.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our theme music is “Ancient Cities” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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