Is T533 a Logograph for BO:K “Smell, Odour”? (2006) (original) (raw)
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Creating a smellmap of a city is a collaborative exercise. During a series of smellwalks, local participants identify distinct aromas emanating from specific locations and record the description, expectation, intensity, personal association, and reaction. I then analyse this data, along with conversations arising from the walks, and select a set of smells that convey the smellscape of the city at that moment in time, visualsing the scents and their locations in the city as a “map”. The resulting map visualisations are propositions: indications of what one might smell in a certain place. The map is accompanied by scents, which are the nasal stimuli, and a catalyst for discussion. This visualisation/olfactory art emphasises human interaction with a vast set of contestable sensory data.
Beans and Glyphs: A Possible IB Logogram in the Classic Maya Script
2014
Although the pace of the decipherment of the Maya writing has markedly slowed in the past ten years or so, hundreds of logograms remain to be read. The present paper offers a set of arguments in support of the decipherment of the variant of the character T709 in Thompson's catalogue (Thompson 1962) as a logogram IB "lima bean" (Phaseolus lunatus). The identification of textual references to lima beans provides the first evidence of their use in the Classic Maya cuisine before 750 C.E.
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It is widely believed that human languages cannot encode odors. While this is true for English, and other related languages, data from some non-Western languages challenge this view. Maniq, a language spoken by a small population of nomadic hunter-gatherers in southern Thailand, is such a language. It has a lexicon of over a dozen terms dedicated to smell. We examined the semantics of these smell terms in 3 experiments (exemplar listing, similarity judgment and off-line rating). The exemplar listing task confirmed that Maniq smell terms have complex meanings encoding smell qualities. Analyses of the similarity data revealed that the odor lexicon is coherently structured by two dimensions. The underlying dimensions are pleasantness and dangerousness, as verified by the off-line rating study. Ethnographic data illustrate that smell terms have detailed semantics tapping into broader cultural constructs. Contrary to the widespread view that languages cannot encode odors, the Maniq data show odor can be a coherent semantic domain, thus shedding new light on the limits of language.
2016
Several logographic signs in Maya hieroglyphic writing resist decipherment because they occur only in a few and semantically very limited contexts. One of these idiosyncratic logograms is the sign which is listed as T284 in the Thompson catalogue. However, in the case of this sign, a series of syllabic spellings provides a key for its unequivocal decipherment.
This paper shows that differences in timing and coordination of articulatory gestures in Kinyarwanda's complex consonants trigger the emergence of epiphenomenal clicks. Acoustic and aerodynamic data show that click bursts of weak intensity appear in sequences of front (bilabial or alveolar) and velar nasals. The possible consequences of this phenomenon for sound change are briefly discussed. The emergence of small vocoids due a different timing of articulatory gestures allows discussing the status of syllabic constituents in complex nasal consonants.
2018
It has long been claimed that there is no lexical field of smell, and that smell is of too little validity to be expressed in grammar. We demonstrate both claims are false. The Cha'palaa language (Ecuador) has at least 15 abstract smell terms, each of which is formed using a type of classifier previously thought not to exist. Moreover, using conversational corpora we show that Cha'palaa speakers also talk about smell more than Imbabura Quechua and English speakers. Together, this shows how language and social interaction may jointly reflect distinct cultural orientations towards sensory experience in general and olfaction in particular. [ol-faction, sensory anthropology, Cha'palaa, Imbabura Quechua, English]
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From Plato to Pinker there has been the common belief that the experience of a smell is impossible to put into words. Decades of studies have confirmed this observation. But the studies to date have focused on participants from urbanized Western societies. Cross-cultural research suggests that there may be other cultures where odors play a larger role. The Jahai of the Malay Peninsula are one such group. We tested whether Jahai speakers could name smells as easily as colors in comparison to a matched English group. Using a free naming task we show on three different measures that Jahai speakers find it as easy to name odors as colors, whereas English speakers struggle with odor naming. Our findings show that the long-held assumption that people are bad at naming smells is not universally true. Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language.
Abstraction through the Merger of Iconic Elements in Forming New Allographs: The Logogram 539
Research Note 12, 2019
One contributor to the calligraphic complexity of Classic Maya writing is the ability afforded by the script to create allographs. There are examples with multiple stages of extraction and simplification to create allographs. In order to create a unique graph, distinctive parts of the feline WAY icon are merged into the well-known allograph with its right half covered in jaguar fur, although both allographs represent the very same sign.