* Asifa Majid, ‘Cultural Factors Shape Olfactory Language’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 629-30.
* Jonas K. Olofsson and Jay A. Gottfried, ‘Response to Majid: Neurocognitive and Cultural Approaches to Odor Naming are Complementary’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 630-31.

Another quick post, catching up on new items in Trends that revisit a topic I’ve covered before. I got quite excited about claims that there are neuroscientific reasons why we don’t have a good vocabulary for smell. You can find my witterings on the subject here, and in two follow-up posts.
      Majid argues that an earlier piece by Olofsson and Gottfried should not have attributed the paucity of olfactory language in English to brain mechanisms. In other cultures — specifically, in the Maniq and Jahai languages of the Malay peninsular — the language of smell seems much richer. Culture, then, may have a lot to do with it. Olofsson and Gottfried respond peaceably and welcome the possibility of further research in a wider variety of languages. They propose that ‘neurocognitive and cross-cultural approaches offer complementary insights’, and can inform one another.
      When I wrote the earlier posts I didn’t expect to come back to this subject, although I’d enjoyed working through a great passage from Virginia Woolf’s Flush, in which a dog’s sensory world is described. However, maybe there is more life in it; let’s all keep an eye out for olfactory eloquence!