Re: Words for smells

My concritters the Tlilerese make use of smell a great deal. Their vision being
closer to the infrared spectrum, much of the notion of color is not useful to
them. They express a lot of their emotions with body odor, and I based a lot fo
their "smell vocabulary" on their emotional vocabulary. Different things,
especially living things, smell sad, agressive, scared, etc. In fact, mush of
the vocabulary is loosely divided into two subcategories, one for emotional
state asociated with the origin of the odor (this thing smell like-it's-sad)
and another for the emotional state induced by the odor (this thing smells
frightening).
 I didn't come up with anything like cardinal odors, I just invented specific
words for things I figured creatures with a hightened sense of smell would
notice. There's a word for rich soil, dry dusty soil, wet clay, various
minerals (rocks are usually described according to smell, rather than
appearance), all sorts of body fluids, various vegatable smells, meat smells,
etc. There's very few generic words for smells, such as acidic, pungent, dank,
etc. There is a kind of declension system for smell words, ranging from very
faint to strong to almost painful. The word pt'eraa means "overwhelming odor of
phosphorous" and pt'erra' means "very faint, fading odor of phosphorous". The
root, pt'erre, is the noun for phosphorous, but should be understood as the
mineral being named for it's smell, not vice versa.

Joseph Bridwell <zhosh@...> wrote:
Y'all might enjoy wandering through:

http://www.glossary-of-terms.net/glossary-of-perfume-terms.html

		
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