>I can think of a reason - humans are vision oriented....
We should also consider how things are named from the start, and the
assumptions we make (during this process) about what someone else is
experiencing. If I see something, I typically assume someone else can
see it, too. It's "right there" in front of us. The same applies to
hearing, though with a bit less certainty. This makes it easy for me
to teach someone else what the name for the thing is. But smell?
Taste? I often find myself asking, "can you smell that?" In other
words, I'm not certain that the next person smells what I smell. With
taste, obviously, the "thing" has to be put in the person's mouth,
and it can't be in two mouths at once (except in some of those films
that I wouldn't let my kid watch). Perhaps because of this I feel
less certain that you taste what I taste. So when I say, "chocolate"
(for example, to teach a kid the name of the taste) I have to be sure
it's in your mouth and you are engaged in tasting it... which seems
to strike me as a slightly more difficult task than just pointing to
something and calling out its name, while assuming you see it.
Further, with taste, we have lots of labels. Who says there are few?
Chicken, blueberry, cherry, chocolate, vanilla, honey, mustard,
coffee, and so on, are, for all practical purposes, taste names, and
the list is certainly much longer than any common list of color
names. One might argue that the names didn't originate in taste, but
does that matter?
If I eat chocolate, when would I say, "tastes like chocolate," rather
than just "chocolate"? Perhaps with smells this happens more often...
but why? What are the conditions leading us to say it "smells like"
rather than to just use the label of the thing that produces (or is)
the smell? I think some uncertainty about the nature of the thing
produces this reaction. How did the girl react to Willie Wonka's
magical gum?
--> Mike O.
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Michael S. Ofsowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED]
University of Maryland - European Division
http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~mofsowit
