英国卫报：人类的感官重要吗？该如何修复？(6)（在线收听）

　　Asifa Majid, a professor of psychology at the University of York and a leading expert on olfactory language, has said that smell used to be considered a “mute sense” compared with sight because English speakers have far fewer words for describing smells than they do for colours.

　　阿西法·马吉德是约克大学的心理学教授，也是嗅觉语言领域的知名专家。他说，相比于视觉，气味过去被认为是一种“无声的感觉”，因为英语使用者用于描述气味的词汇远少于用于描述颜色的词汇。

　　But Majid’s field work has shown that for certain hunter-gatherer communities, smells can be named as easily as colours.

　　但马吉德的实地研究表明，对于某些狩猎采集社区，气味可以像颜色一样容易命名。

　　Among the nomadic Seri community in Mexico for example, speakers have different words to distinguish between the specific smell of sea lion, the smell of spoiled beans, the smell of burned beans, the smell of cooking immature green sea turtle and the smell of rancid honey.

　　例如，在墨西哥的族游牧部落塞里，人们用不同的词来区分海狮的特殊气味、变质豆子的气味、烧焦的豆子的气味、烹饪未成熟的绿海龟的气味和腐臭的蜂蜜的气味。

　　For the Seri, this rich smellscape is a crucial part of everyday life.

　　对于塞里来说，这种浓郁的气味是日常生活中至关重要的一部分。

　　By contrast, someone living in London or New York today might smell the burned beans just as potently as the Seri, but have no word for the particular way it smelled beyond “yuck”.

　　相比之下，今天生活在伦敦或纽约的人可能会像塞里人一样闻到烧焦的豆子的味道，但除了“恶心”之外，没有别的词来形容这种味道。

　　As Majid writes: “In English, a stink is a stink is a stink.”

　　正如马吉德所写：“在英语中，恶臭就是恶臭。

　　We sometimes make fun of wine writers for describing the perfume of different wines in such pretentious terms (“a bouquet of liquorice” or “topnotes of gooseberry”), but similes are often the only way we can describe smells with any precision in English because our odour vocabulary is so limited.

　　我们有时会取笑葡萄酒作家用如此矫揉造作的术语来描述不同葡萄酒的香气(“一束甘草”或“醋栗的香气”)，但在英语中，比喻往往是我们唯一能精确描述气味的方式，因为我们对气味的词汇非常有限。

　　Long after the decline of hunter-gathering, however, selecting food continued to be deeply sensual.

　　然而，在狩猎采集衰落很久之后，挑选食物仍然是一种深深的感官享受。

　　The historian Madeleine Ferrières has described the order in which a buyer would traditionally use his or her senses when buying food at a medieval food market in France.

　　历史学家Madeleine Ferrières描述了买家在法国中世纪的食品市场购买食物时传统上使用感官的顺序。

　　The first task was to smell, because it was common knowledge that “everything that stinks, kills”.

　　第一任务是闻，因为众所周知，“凡是臭气熏天的东西都会致命”。

　　Next came close looking, to confirm that the food really was as fresh as it seemed.

　　然后仔细看，确认食物真的像看起来那样新鲜。

　　The next sense was touch, taking the food in the hand to gauge its weight and assess its quality.

　　接下来是触摸，拿着手中的食物来感受它的重量和评估它的质量。

　　Finally, a buyer might taste a little of the food to determine whether the produce really was fit to eat.

　　最后，买家可能会品尝一点食物，以确定产品是否真的适合食用。

　　In the French civil code, consumers had a right to touch and taste a sample of the food before they committed to buying it.

　　在法国民法典中，消费者有权在承诺购买之前触摸和品尝食物的样品。

　　A sensory approach to food shopping continues to be normal to some degree wherever there are open-air food markets.

　　无论在哪里，只要有露天食品市场，在某种程度上，购买食品的感官方式仍然是正常的。

　　Traditionally, to test whether a watermelon was ripe, Chinese consumers would tap on it.

　　传统上，为了测试西瓜是否成熟，中国消费者会轻敲西瓜。

　　Ripe melons make a hollow sound.

　　成熟的瓜发出空洞的声音。