How common languages cope with the diversity of the senses: some examples from different (distant or close) languages
(Languages and the senses – 1: Across languages within senses)
D. Dubois (CNRS - LCPE/LAM) & A. Giboreau (ADRIANT - LCPE); a.giboreau@adriant.com
Consumer studies have to face with the diversity of people and of their associated cultural values. The present communication will address the diversity of linguistic resources across languages, at two levels: a first level contrasting very different languages and their correlated differences in conceptualisation of sensory categories, mainly colours and odours. Secondly, in exploring, at a more fine grain level, the semantics of some highly polysemic words largely used as descriptors in sensory analysis, across close languages such as French, or English.
1. If it is commonly considered that terms nicely fit visual categories, olfactory experience is being considered as « more subjective », not easy to described and limited to hedonic values. However, from linguistic literature, we can find many languages which lexical resources in different sense modalities give a quite different “sensoryscape”:
- Wanzi language (Gabon) provides nouns for odours,
- in Fon (Benin), there is no word for “our” concept of colour
- in Hanunoo (Philippines) there is no strict colour term, the “colour” being given by the name of a typical source (as it is for “us” for odours).
2. Within European languages, linguistic analysis may suggest improving translations for sensory evaluation purposes. For example, to better control and account for the polysemy of high frequent sensory terms such as “doux” in French, hardly mapping one single word in English (translated as soft, sweet, mild … depending on the sense modality involved)?
Improving our understanding of how the diversity of languages copes with the diversity of senses, we expect to better identify the different conceptualisations in different modalities. That would may be impulse more extensive research within the sensory science, expending the research to most European languages and therefore progressing in the analysis of consumers’ discourses as well as in elaborating referential terminologies for descriptive analysis.