DO OUR LANGUAGES SHAPE US? OR DO WE SHAPE OUR LANGUAGES?  PART 2 

YESTERDAY, WE LEARNED OF A LANGUAGE that logically places the past in front of us (where it’s readily perceived) and the future behind us (because it cannot be seen). Today in Part 2, tidbits continue from Manvir Singh’s article in The New Yorker with thoughts of sensory descriptions in different languages around the world.

What Do You See? Hear? Touch? Singh observes, “Western writers have long assumed that human beings have an inherently limited capacity to describe some senses, with olfaction ranking as the most elusive. We can speak abstractly about colors (red, blue, black) and sound (high, low, loud). With smell, though, we usually give ‘source-based’ references (‘like cut grass’).”

Image from A Tale of Two Mothers.

Other Languages Excel. This needn’t be the case, though: Singh observes the Jahai, “hunter-gatherers living at the border of Malaysia and Thailand, have a rich vocabulary of abstract smell words…. Subsequent research has found large olfactory lexicons in at least forty other languages, among them Fang, Khmer, Swahili, and Zapotec.”

“Can You Hear Me Now?” Singh brings up another linguistic contrast: “English describes acoustic pitch using a verticality metaphor (high-low), but a study by experts in musical cognition found that people around the world use at least thirty-five other mappings, such as small-big, alert-sleepy, pretty-ugly, tense-relaxed, summer-winter, and—in the case of some traditional Zimbabwean instrumentalists—‘crocodile’ (low pitch) and ‘those who follow crocodiles” (high pitch).’ ”

Measuring Codability.  Singh shares a definition, “Codability is high when members of a language community converge on one or two abstract labels to describe a stimulus; ask English speakers to tell you the color of a stop sign, and you’d expect high codability. It’s low, in contrast, when people provide diverse, protracted, and ad-hoc descriptions—as when, say, you ask English speakers to describe the smell of a rutabaga.”

Singh cites researchers measuring codability for the five senses in 20 languages, including three unrelated sign languages. He says, “English, the only spoken Western European tongue in the sample, was also the only one to exhibit high codability for sight and hearing and low codability for everything else [touch, for example]…. In many languages, including Lao, Farsi, Yucatec, and Cantonese, taste turned out to be the most expressible sense.”

Image from Moon Kee Restaurant. 

On the Evolution of Languages. Singh concludes by observing, “… few tongues exemplify the ever-evolving nature of language better than so-called Standard English, which, after millennia of conquest, conversion, and commerce, has acquired a vocabulary that is roughly seventy per cent non-Germanic and a simplified grammar that facilitates its spread among adults.”

Also, he says, “If ways of speaking can alter ways of thinking, ways of thinking can alter ways of speaking as well.” ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025