Odor Descriptions from a Language Perspective

Abstract

Talking about food is essential in our life. We love certain products, others are disgusting. While eating and drinking, we might express spontaneously our perceptions that foods have triggered. The range of reactions include nonverbal behavior, changing our facial expressions and bodily movements, verbal statements of liking and disliking including emotional and evaluative judgements, as well as analytical and neutral or objective descriptions. Our evaluation starts off with the perception of visual stimuli and volatile compounds eliciting an olfactory impression to the perception of various sensory modalities during breakdown of the food including taste, retronasal aroma and texture, as well as trigeminal impressions. As human beings, we use our senses to judge the quality of food. However, it is not always straightforward to verbalize what is perceived for all sensory impressions. Olfactory impressions are known to be difficult to describe. This chapter elaborates on language for odor descriptions from a language perspective with focus on the German and English or translated vocabularies. Culture and language are closely connected and shape the way we talk about olfactory impressions. Insights are given into vocabularies of people who are trained in describing food products and in everyday language, principally, what we experience in daily life when we are confronted with sensory stimuli.