THE CHALLENGE OF OLFACTORY IDEOPHONES:RECONSIDERING INEFFABILITYFROM THE TOTONAC-TEPEHUA PERSPECTIVE 1
CAROLYN O’MEARASUSAN SMYTHE KUNG

NATIONAL AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF MEXICO

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTINASIFA MAJID
UNIVERSITY OF YORK
Olfactory impressions are said to be ineffable, but little systematic exploration has been
done to substantiate this. We explored olfactory language in Huehuetla Tepehua—a TotonacTepehua language spoken in Hidalgo, Mexico—which has a large inventory of ideophones,
words with sound-symbolic properties used to describe perceptuomotor experiences. A
multi-method study found Huehuetla Tepehua has 45 olfactory ideophones, illustrating
intriguing sound-symbolic alternation patterns. Elaboration in the olfactory domain is notunique to this language; related Totonac-Tepehua languages also have impressive smell
lexicons. Comparison across these languages shows olfactory and gustatory terms overlap
in interesting ways, mirroring the physiology of smelling and tasting. However, althoughcognate taste terms are formally similar, olfactory terms are less so. We suggest the relative
instability of smell vocabulary in comparison with those of taste likely results from the morevaried olfactory experiences caused by the mutability of smells in different environments.
[KEYWORDS: Ideophones, Tepehua, Totonac, olfaction, depiction, comparative method]

1 This project was jointly conceived by the three authors as part of the NWO VICI “Human
Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology” project 277-70-011 (PI Majid),which also provided funding. Novel data were collected by O’Meara and Kung in August 2014 in
Huehuetla, Hidalgo, Mexico. Kung provided further invaluable expertise on Huehuetla Tepehua
gleaned from years of prior research. All authors contributed to the writing of the paper, withO’Meara taking the lead role. We are immensely grateful to the native speakers of Huehuetla
Tepehua who took the time and energy to share their language with us, including Alicia Granillo
Apolonio, Angelita García Vigueras, Catalina Vigueras Gutierrez, Dolores Alejandro Santiago,
Fidela Sevilla García, Fidela Tolentino Huerta, Feliza Eologio Huerta, Ignacia Mina Vigueras,
Isabel Huerta Santiago, José Tolentino Alejandro, Juana García Alejandro, Juana Gutierrez Patricio, Laurencio Vigueras Patricio, Lola García Santiago, Lola Santiago Cristobal, Lucia Quintero
Primo, Magdalena García Encarnación, Miguel Vigueras Patricio, Nicolás Vigueras Patricio, andTeresa Crecencio Dominguez. All uncited Huehuetla Tepehua data in this paper are taken fromthe recordings and notes made by O’Meara and Kung during the fieldwork described herein;notes and recordings are archived at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America(AILLA) under record number 255668 and may be freely accessed and used according to AILLA’s
user guidelines (https://www.ailla.utexas.org/). We are grateful to David Beck, Carolyn MacKay,
and Paulette Levy for sharing unpublished data with us and to Mark Dingemanse and membersof the Meaning, Culture, and Cognition group for their helpful comments.

[IJAL, vol. 85, no. 2, April 2019, pp. 173–212]© 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0020–7071/2019/8502–0001$10.00 DOI 10.1086/701801

173

174

international journal of american linguistics

1. Introduction. It has long been said that olfaction is ineffable—that is,
impossible to put into words (e.g., Henning 1916; Sperber 1975; Levinson and
Majid 2014; Olofsson and Gottfried 2015)—but studies show some languages
have elaborate lexicons for smell (e.g., Hombert 1992; van Beek 1992; Burenhult and Majid 2011; Tufvesson 2011; Storch 2013, 2014; Wnuk and Majid
2014; O’Meara and Majid 2016). One of the first articles to illustrate a lexicalfield in the domain of olfaction did so for Sierra Totonac, a language spoken
in eastern Mexico (Aschmann 1946). This lexical domain was further elaborated in Aschmann’s dictionary of Sierra Totonac, which contains 23 different
adjective entries under the Spanish infinitive oler ‘to smell’ (2000:137–38).
Aschmann’s (1946) paper was also intriguing in that he showed a special kindof linguistic coding of olfactory concepts that utilized sound-symbolic phonemic alternations to represent changes in odor qualities. This process of using sound-symbolic phonemic alternations to represent changes in meaning is
exploited throughout the Totonac-Tepehua language family (McQuown 1990
[1940]; Aschmann 1983; Bishop 1984; Levy 1987; Watters 1988; MacKay
1999; Beck 2004; Kung 2007), and, as we will show, it is especially prevalent
in the olfactory domain. Notably, sound-symbolic alternations are frequently
found in ideophones in these languages (Kung 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; Beck2007, 2008; McFarland 2010).
Ideophones—which have also been called expressives, mimetics, soundsymbolic words, and affect words, among other terms—are words with soundsymbolic properties used to describe perceptuomotor experiences (Doke 1935;
Kaufman 1988; Kulemeka 1995; Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001; England 2004;
Dingemanse 2012; Dingemanse et al. 2015). Dingemanse (2011:25) has proposed the following definition: “marked words that depict sensory imagery.”For example, in Upper Necaxa Totonac, kimkimkim is an ideophone used toindicate the way a firefly flashes repeatedly, and tsanana, the buzzing soundof insects (Beck 2008). It has been suggested that sensorial experiences inparticular lead to iconic form-to-meaning mappings cross-linguistically (Perniss et al. 2010). Such mappings involve perceived resemblance between thesign and the object, which can be observed in examples of vowel lengthening to indicate extent (e.g., a loooong time ago), or reduplication to indicate
repetition or pluralization (e.g., in Tohono O’odham, gogs ‘dog’ and gogogs‘dogs’; Hill and Zepeda 1992:386). However, ideophones show different degrees of iconicity, and in more recent studies they have been characterized
by their depictive nature, and only secondarily as iconic (Dingemanse 2012).
Doke (1935), who established the classic definition of the term ideophone
in his book of Bantu terminology, specifically mentions smell as one of thequalities that ideophones are likely to indicate. This is surprising because
smell is considered ineffable to this day. To dispel this prevailing view, thepresent paper presents a case study of olfactory terms, many of which areideophones, and explores what Totonac-Tepehua languages have to tell us
about ideophones and olfactory language more generally.

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

175

Our case study focuses on Huehuetla Tepehua. At first glance, Huehuetla
Tepehua seemed compatible with claims of the ineffability of olfaction sinceinitial exploration suggested scant vocabulary in this domain, but targeted
elicitation using a multi-method approach revealed an elaborate lexical fieldof smell. We found Huehuetla Tepehua has more than 40 odor terms, some ofwhich are ideophones. At the same time, although we uncover an extensive
repertoire of odor terms in the language, including various ideophones, wefind their semantic properties differ in interesting ways from other ideophones
in Huehuetla Tepehua. Olfactory ideophones are not as transparent in their
sensory profiles. The implications of this are far-reaching: theories of ideophones (e.g., Dingemanse 2011) not only need to be revised to include thedistal modalities of vision and sight but must also include in their purview
the less-described perceptual modalities.
Finally, by comparing related olfactory terms across Totonac-Tepehua languages we take a comparative-historical perspective and show that olfactoryterms have longevity, as evidenced by the large number of cognates. Thisfinding proves problematic for claims of ineffability in the olfactory domain
and its presumed ephemerality, and it raises questions regarding the durability of ideophones (Lanham 1960, as cited in Childs 1994). Interestingly,
although forms remain stable, meanings appear more malleable, suggesting
olfactory semantics change to reflect local ecologies more than terms fromother perceptual domains.
1.1. The ineffability of smell reconsidered. Olfaction has generally
been considered ineffable, a domain that is not linguistically coded (Levinson and Majid 2014), and cross-linguistically rara (Plank and Filimonova
2000). Psychological studies have shown that people struggle to name odors
under controlled experimental situations. When given the smell of cinnamon
in one study, for example, English speakers said it smelled of bayberry,candy, Red Hot, smoky, spicy, sweet, edible, wine, potpourri, as well as of
cinnamon (Majid and Burenhult 2014:270). In fact, of the ten people asked,
nine different descriptions were given. In addition, when odor-related words
are read (silently), olfactory representations are not accessed in the same
way that, for example, auditory representations are accessed from soundrelated words (Speed and Majid 2018), and some neuroscientists conclude
accordingly that olfactory and language areas are not well connected (Olofsson and Gottfried 2015).
At the same time, evidence that languages can have elaborated smell lexicons is accumulating (e.g., Hombert 1992; van Beek 1992; Blench and Longtau 1995; Storch and Vossen 2006; Lee 2014; Majid and Burenhult 2014;
Wnuk and Majid 2014; Majid 2015; O’Meara and Majid 2016; Majid andKruspe 2018). This increasing interest in the topic means that field linguists
are turning to their own records to discover whether the language they study
is hiding its olfactory potential under a bushel. Sometimes such perusals

176

international journal of american linguistics

return little of interest. However, we show in our case study here that specificelicitation methods can uncover hidden gems that challenge the long-heldnotion of ineffability in olfaction.
When it comes to eliciting sensory language, auditory, visual, and tactile
experiences are easier to enact and, as such, elicit (Ratliff 1992; Voeltz andKilian-Hatz 2001; Tufvesson 2007). However, olfactory and gustatory experiences typically have not been targeted in this way as a part of the standard
battery of language description tasks (see, however, Majid 2007; Majid et al.
2018). Using Sniffin’ Sticks as an elicitation method (see 2.2), we revisited thelexicon of sensory experiences in Huehuetla Tepehua with a specific focus on
olfactory language. This lexical domain in Huehuetla Tepehua contains many
ideophones, whose morphophonological markedness and semantic specificity provide additional complexity for linguists seeking elicitation methods todocument language (e.g., Samarin 1967; Mithun 1982; Blench 2010).
1.2. Semantics of ideophones and the challenge from olfaction. The
fact that some languages have attested olfactory lexicons while others do notraises the broader question of what sorts of linguistic strategies are available
for referring to odors cross-linguistically. One common strategy for namingodors is to use nouns (or derived adjectives such as lemony or chocolatey)that refer to a specific source (e.g., it smells like banana, rose, tar, etc.).
This appears to be the default mode for Standard Average European languages. Another strategy is the use of verbs. This is attested in the Aslian
languages of the Malay Peninsula, for example, where elaborate lexical fields
for smell are predominantly expressed as stative verbs (e.g., Burenhult andMajid 2011; Majid and Burenhult 2014; Wnuk and Majid 2014). In theselanguages, the smell vocabulary is said to be “basic” (cf. Berlin and Kay1969) since the terms referring to abstract odor qualities are not related toany specific odor source (Burenhult and Majid 2011). In the African context,
a number of studies suggest smell terminology is “ideophone-like.” However,
the morpho-syntactic properties of smell terms in these languages do not fit
into the attested word classes, and they have been argued to be a distinct
class of their own (Blench and Longtau 1995; Storch 2004; Blench 2010).
In this context it is particularly interesting to consider olfactory ideophones
in more detail. Studies of ideophones have paid less attention to the semantics
and use of such terms in naturally occurring speech, focusing instead on theirstructural properties (Dingemanse 2012; although see Childs 1994; Chapman
1996; Smoll 2015; Henderson 2016; Lee 2017). The marked behavior of ideophones morphologically and phonologically, in addition to their rich referential
qualities, has posed considerable problems for lexicographers (Beck 2008).
Observations of ideophone semantics tend to express generalizations, such as:
ideophones convey rich and specific meanings concisely (see, for example,
Samarin 1967; Beck 2008; Dingemanse 2011, 2012). Dingemanse (2011:228)

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

177

has linked the semantic specificity of ideophones to the fact that they are
depictive of sensory imagery. Depiction in ideophones has been describedas “a performance, inviting us to ‘look’ in such a way that we make believe
we are actually experiencing the scene depicted” (Dingemanse 2012:655).
Similarly, ideophones in Pastaza Quichua have been described as differingfrom other adverbs in the language in that they involve performative simulation (Nuckolls 2010). With depiction—as opposed to description—people“mainly rely on their visual, auditory, tactile, and proprioceptive knowledgeof physical scenes and on their ability to use one scene in imagining another”(Clark 2016:324). For instance, one type of depiction could be someone saying “this long” while gesturing with their hands to indicate the exact length:
the co-speech gesture, then, depicts length.
It is presently not clear whether the semantics of olfactory ideophones
more closely resemble those found in nouns or verbs, or if they express a
different meaning complex altogether (i.e., whether they are “depictive”).
There are only a handful of previous studies describing high levels of semantic elaboration in the olfactory domain by means of ideophones. In Semai,an Aslian language spoken in Malaysia, 15 of its 25 smell terms adhere tolanguage-specific ideophone templates. The basic template appears to encode
a particular type of odor quality, while vowel alternations modify the odor
intensity or quality (Tufvesson 2011; see also Svantesson 2017 on Kammu).
This semantic model appears to have wider applicability, as we will showin 2 in the context of olfactory terms in Huehuetla Tepehua, as well as Totonac (Aschmann 1946, 2000; Enríquez Andrade 2004, 2010; Santiago Francisco 2009), which we come back to in more detail in 3. Given the claimed
limitations of encoding olfaction, characterizing olfactory language in moredetail is important to a future typology of olfactory terms, as well as to theunderstanding of ideophone semantics more generally.
1.3. Further insights on olfactory terminology from a comparative
perspective. If olfactory language is poor, as is presumed, then we certainly would not expect it to have much longevity. This would seem tohold in particular for olfactory ideophones. Compared with non-ideophonicwords, ideophones have been said to be replaced at a faster rate (Lanham 1960, as cited in Childs 1994): speakers can employ language-specificmeans to easily coin new ideophones, and these, in turn, are effortlessly
understood by hearers, given the systematic ways sounds are mapped tomeanings within this word class. This adaptability and fluidity suggests
there would be fast turnover of ideophones, and as such, less stability incognate terms across related languages. However, very few studies haveattempted to examine cognate ideophone forms across related languages, although Blench (2010:274) indicates that ideophones tend not to be cognates
lexically. Here we present one of the first comparative studies of meanings

178

international journal of american linguistics

expressed by ideophones by exploring the olfactory and gustatory domains
within languages from the Totonac-Tepehua language family, which containmany ideophones.
We show terms of olfaction and gustation occasionally overlap in interesting ways, mirroring the physiology of smelling and tasting. Nevertheless, it ispossible to delimit these domains. When we do so, we see cognate taste terms
are formally relatively similar across these languages, but this is less so forolfactory lexemes. The instability of olfactory terms across languages could
have its roots in the pan-human “weak link” between olfaction and language(Rivlin and Gravelle 1984; Olofsson and Gottfried 2015). We propose, instead,that the relative stability of taste terms and concomitant variation in olfactoryterms is actually the result of the uniformity of taste vs. olfactory experiences
caused by the mutability of smells in different environments.
Before turning to the comparative historical data in 3, we first focus in detailon one language in particular, Hueuelta Tepehua. In 2, we demonstrate that
Huehuelta Tepehua has a rich repertoire of olfactory terms, many of which
are ideophones, by presenting novel data elicited using sensory materials. To
provide the necessary backdrop, we begin by presenting some general information about Huehuetla Tepehua, and the basic characteristics of ideophones
in this language (2.1). We then describe a method for eliciting olfactoryideophones in the field (2.2) and explore the meaning of olfactory terms, inparticular their intriguing sound-symbolic alternation patterns and what theymight indicate about olfactory semantics in general (2.3).
2. Odor terms in Huehuetla Tepehua. Huehuetla Tepehua (ISO code:tee) is spoken in the state of Hidalgo, located in the eastern Sierra Madrein the Central Gulf Coast region of Mexico. The town of Huehuetla is theseat of the municipality of the same name. Huehuetla Tepehua is part of the
Totonac-Tepehua language family that Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark(1986) describe as an isolate family in Mesoamerica, but that Brown et al.
(2011) classify as belonging to the Totozoquean language family, which
includes the Mixe-Zoquean language family as well. Census data (INEGI2005) reports 1,794 speakers of Huehuetla Tepehua. Similarly, Kung (2007)
reports fewer than 1,500 speakers of this variety, which she has described
as a moribund language no longer actively transmitted to children, and withalmost no monolingual speakers left. Spanish, the dominant language of
Mexico, is quickly taking over in the town of Huehuetla as the preferredlanguage of daily communication.
Huehuetla Tepehua is a polysynthetic head-marking language with complex
verbal morphology in which verbal inflection is marked by both prefixes
and suffixes (Kung 2007:23). The constituent order is pragmatically determined, but there is a tendency toward VSO word order when there are nothe challenge of olfactory ideophones

179

TABLE 1CONSONANT INVENTORY OF HUEHUETLA TEPEHUA (KUNG 2007:30)
Bilabial Alveolar
Stop
Glottalized Stop
Nasal
Fricative
Affricate
Glottalized
Affricate
LiquidTrill &
Flap
Approximant

p
p’
m

t
t’
n
s
͡ts

LateralPalatoAlveolar

Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
k
k’

ɬ

*q
*q’

ʔ

ʃ
ࢎt‫ݕ‬
ࢎt‫’ݕ‬

͡ts’
l
r
ɾ
w

j

h

contextual clues to indicate preferred participant roles (such as animacy andcultural relevance), and SVO when there are (Kung 2007:ix). In addition tohaving verbs and nouns, Huehuetla Tepehua also has classes of adjectives
and adverbs, some of which manifest themselves as full words, and others
as particles (Kung 2007:24).
2.1. Ideophones and sound symbolism in Huehuetla Tepehua. Ideophones in Huehuetla Tepehua are a subclass of manner adverbs, which haveboth ideophonic and non-ideophonic forms (Kung 2005, 2007). Adverbs are
distinguished from nouns, verbs, and adjectives in that they are never inflected, they always precede the verb, and they frequently occur with lightverbs. In addition, ideophones show marked behavior when it comes to stressand vowel devoicing. Our focus is olfactory terms, but Kung (2005, 2006a,
2006b) describes the types of sounds, actions, and sensations that are also
encoded in Huehuetla Tepehua ideophones. We first provide information regarding the relevant characteristics of ideophones in Huehuetla Tepehua toillustrate how they differ from non-ideophonic words.
In order to understand how ideophones compare with the rest of the lexicon,
we start by presenting some basic phonological facts (tables 1 and 2). Huehuetla Tepehua has 20 native consonants, with two additional consonants foundonly in ideophones (/r/, /ɾ/) and three consonants found in Spanish loanwords(/b/, /d/, /g/) or in allophonic distribution to their voiceless counterparts (Kung2007:30). Note that all stops and affricates have both plain and glottalizedversions, and that the plain and glottalized uvular stops have recently mergedwith the glottal stop (Smythe 2003; Kung 2007).
Huehuetla Tepehua has a five-vowel system (table 2). Tepehua vowels pattern like the rest of the language family in that vowel length is contrastive;

180

international journal of american linguistics
TABLE 2VOWEL INVENTORY OF HUEHUETLA TEPEHUA(KUNG 2007:32)
Front
High
Mid
Low

Central

i, iː
e, eː

Back
u, uː
o, oː

a, aː

however, unlike the Totonac branch of the family, vowel laryngealization is notcontrastive in Tepehua. Although Proto-Totonac-Tepehua had a three-vowel
inventory that excluded the mid vowels (Arana 1953; Brown et al. 2011),
Huehuetla Tepehua currently has a five-vowel inventory in all areas of thelexicon, including native Tepehua words (e.g., maːʃteːwan ‘brown tadpole’,
popaʔ ‘man’) as well as ideophones (e.g., seːnik ‘sound of a tree falling’,ɬt’oː ‘jumping motion’) and loanwords (e.g., teːnsuːn ‘goat’ from Nahuatl
tentzontli ‘goat’, koneːhuː ‘rabbit’ from Spanish conejo). The phonemes /e(ː)/
and /o(ː)/ in many of the modern native Tepehua words were historically allophones of /i(ː)/ and /u(ː)/, whose lowering was conditioned by proximity
to the historic uvular stop; some examples include ʃʔoj (>*ʃquj) ‘leaf’, t͡soʔot(>*t͡suqut) ‘knee’, poʔʃ (>*puqʃ) ‘dust’, ʃʔen (>*ʃqin) ‘fly (n.)’, ʔeʃ (>*qiʃ) ‘rockfence’, siːleʔ (>*siːliq) ‘cricket’. Minimal pairs that do not involve semantically related lexemes (such as pututu ‘ball’ and pototo ‘really big ball’) are
hard to find, but they do exist (e.g., ʔuːn ‘wind’ and ʔoːn ‘fat’), evidence that
Huehuetla Tepehua now has a five-vowel system.
Stress in Huehuetla Tepehua manifests in two ways: lengthening of thestressed vowel and increased intensity on the stressed syllable (Smythe 2000).
Huehuetla Tepehua exhibits a highly unusual and complex stress assignment
pattern in non-ideophonic and non-loan words, and we present only the briefest overview here in order to establish how the stress pattern for ideophones
differs. In non-ideophonic native Huehuetla Tepehua lexemes, including nonideophonic adverbs, stress is assigned right to left. Primary stress falls on the
final syllable of the word if it ends in the sonorant obstruent /n/ or a glide(h, ʔ, w, j) (1); otherwise it falls on the penult (2). Secondary stress is assigned to alternate syllables starting with the primary stress bearing syllable
and moving from right to left (Kung 2007:105–6). Note, although /m/ and/l/ are also sonorant obstruents in Huehuetla Tepehua, separate phonologicalprocesses prevent these two phonemes from occurring in word-final position.
(1) Ultimate primary stressa. p’uɬ.̍nan‘first’b. ʔaː.̍liʔ‘more’c. ִtѻa.̍waj‘now’‘multicolored’d. ִtѻoː.̍lewe. ˌtun.ka.̍hun‘daily’f. la.ˌʔa.tִ ѻa.̍ ʔan ‘town’the challenge of olfactory ideophones

181(2) Penultimate primary stressa. ̍ ʔak.sniː
‘when’b. ִ̍tѻu.ʔut‘saliva’c. la.̍ ʔa.siː
‘first’d. ʃna.̍pa.pḁ
‘white’e. maː.̍tuː.pik‘butterfly’f. ˌtִ ѻ’a.ʔa.̍waʃ.t’i̥‘Totonac (person)’All examples in (1) demonstrate that stress falls on the final syllable when theword ends in the sonorant obstruent /n/ or a glide; (1e) and (1f) further show
the alternate syllable placement of secondary stress. In (2), the examples showthat when the word ends in any other sound, the penultimate syllable bears
primary stress; (2f) demonstrates the secondary stress on alternate syllables.
Ideophones behave differently from other word types in that stress is assigned left to right, with primary stress always falling on the first syllable of
the word and secondary stress on all subsequent syllables (Kung 2007:122[147]); see (3).
(3) Stress in ideophonesa. ̍ ʔu.ˌli‘delicious smell, smell of flowers’b. ̍ ʔu.ˌli.ˌli‘delicious smell’c. ̍ka.ˌni‘delicious or beautiful odor’
d. ̍ka.ˌni.ˌni‘delicious or beautiful odor’e. ̍sʔa.ˌhaʔ‘bitter smell’Examples (3a) and (3c) both bear primary stress on the penult and have a final
syllable that ends in a short vowel. Whereas these words appear to follow
the primary stress rule for non-ideophones, the examples in (3b), (3d), and(3e) do not follow the primary stress rule for non-ideophones since primarystress does not fall on the penult in (3b) or (3d) or on the final syllable ending in a glide in (3e). These ideophones also differ from non-ideophones intheir assignment of secondary stress to every subsequent syllable from left
to right. Since stress manifests as vowel-lengthening in Huehuetla Tepehua,
this means that short vowels in ideophones do not sound short.
Ideophones differ phonologically from other native vocabulary in anotherway: while word-final short vowels are obligatorily devoiced or even optionally
deleted in non-ideophones when they occur in isolation (Kung 2007:124–26),
as seen in (4a) and (4b), respectively, they are always voiced and never deleted
from ideophones in isolation (Kung 2007:437), shown in (4c) and (4d). 2
2 Abbreviations: 1, first person; 3, third person; ART, article; DAT,

dative; EMP, emphasis;

FOC, focus; ID, ideophone; IMPFV, imperfective; INO, indefinite object; OBJ, object; IPOS, impersonal

possessor; PF, perfect aspect; PFV, perfective aspect; PL, plural; POS, possessive; SUB, subject; V,
unspecified vowel quality in suffixes; VOC, vocative. We use the following abbreviations forlanguage names: FM Tot, Filomeno Mata Totonac; H Tep, Huehuetla Tepehua; Mi Tot, Misantla
Totonac; Pa Tot, Papantla Totonac; PF Tep, Pisaflores Tepehua; Si Tot, Sierra Totonac; Tl Tep,
Tlachichilco Tepehua; UN Tot, Upper Necaxa Totonac. We use IPA in the examples, some of

182

(4)

international journal of american linguistics

Short vowel devoicing and optional deletion in non-ideophonesa. ʃaː–nati̥ ‘IPOS-mother’b. ʃaː–nat ‘IPOS-mother’No short vowel devoicing in ideophonesc. sk’uli
d. kiʃiʃi‘a beautiful odor (floral or citrus)’‘hissing sound of a snake’

Word-final short vowels also weaken phrase-finally in non-ideophones,
as in (5).
(5a) Phrase-final position, short vowel devoicing
hiː kiːnati̥hiː kiː–nati
VOC 1POS–mother‘Mother!’(Kung 2007:125, ex. 105)(5b) Phrase-internal position, no short vowel devoicing
huː natiʃʔoːjART mother dog‘female dog’(Kung 2007:125, ex.106b)
In (5a), kiːnati̥ ‘my mother’ occurs at the end of the vocative phrase, and theword-final short vowel is devoiced. Compare this with (5b) in which nati
occurs phrase-internally, and the word-final short vowel is voiced.
Ideophones in Huehuetla Tepehua belong to the adverbial word class; specifically, they are a type of manner adverb. Like all adverbs in this language,ideophones precede the verbs they modify, and they are never inflected. By
virtue of their status as adverbs, ideophones never occur in a phrase-final
position, which is the very position in which non-ideophonic lexemes undergo the process of final-short vowel devoicing described above. However,ideophones frequently occur in isolation—for example, during elicitation or
in response to a question. Such examples are seen in (6), where the word-final
short vowels are not devoiced phrase-finally.
(6a) waː
FOC

meʔe
ID

‘It smells of beef cooking.’(Kung and O’Meara 2014:36)
which have been adapted from examples provided in practical orthographies in other TotonacTepehua languages.

the challenge of olfactory ideophones(6b) naːEMP

183

kaniniID‘It smells good, savory.’(Kung and O’Meara 2014:50)
Ideophones, like other manner adverbs, may be repeated; however, ideophones differ in that they are the only class of words in Huehuetla Tepehuathat undergo reduplication, the semantics of which are discussed in moredetail in 2.3. Non-ideophonic adverbial words and phrases may be repeatedfor emphasis (Kung 2007:437–38), as seen in (7).
Reduplication in non-ideophones(7a) ࢎt‫ݕ‬awaj ࢎt‫ݕ‬awaj k’anantḁࢎt‫ݕ‬awaj ࢎt‫ݕ‬awaj k–ʔan–an–ta
now
now
1SUB–go–?–PF‘I’m going now, now.’(7b) naː ʔoʃ naː ʔoʃ kiʃkanij[naː ʔoʃ] [naː ʔoʃ]
EMP
good EMP good‘I hurt very, very badly.’kin–ʃka–ni-j
1OBJ–hurt-DAT–IMPFV(Kung 2007:438)

Both repetition and reduplication are especially salient in Huehuetla Tepehua ideophones, which undergo not only the complete repetition seen abovein (7) but also partial and iterative reduplication as well. Complete repetition
in ideophones can be linked to the number of times a discrete action or event
takes place. An ideophone pronounced one time without repetition can mean
the sound, action, or sensation being referred to occurred once, as in (8a), but
if the word is repeated, then multiplicity is indicated, as in (8b).
(8a) laʔa makat’awɬ huː kimpiːʃtuʔlaʔa makat’ahun–li huː kin–piːʃtuʔIDsound–PFVART
1POS–neck‘My neck popped once.’(8b) laʔa laʔa makat’awɬ huː kimpiːʃtuʔlaʔa laʔa makat’ahun–li huː kin–piːʃtuʔID
ID
sound–PFVART 1POS–neck‘My neck popped several times.’[laʔa ‘popping noise’](Kung 2007:439)
In reduplication, the final syllable may be reduplicated to indicate the sound,action or sensation is long, continuous, or enduring. The examples in (9) show

184

international journal of american linguistics

what Kung (2007) calls partial reduplication (9b) and iterative reduplication
(9c).
(9a)

kani

‘delicious or beautiful odor’(9b)kanini ‘strong or enduring delicious or beautiful odor’(9c)kaninini ‘especially strong or enduring delicious or beautiful odor’

In (9b) and (9c), iterative reduplications of the final syllable are used iconically to indicate an even longer-lasting or enduring sound, action, or sensation(Dingemanse et al. 2015).
Huehuetla Tepehua has several morphological frames that allow a verb stem
to be derived from an ideophone. One such frame is illustrated in (10) withthe olfactory ideophone p’uks, which is used to describe strong, stinky odors.
(10a) p’uks p’uks ʔakamin huː ɬiːwajp’uks p’uks ʔakamin huː ɬiːwaj
ID
ID
smell
ART
meat
‘The meat stinks.’[p’uks ‘a strong and stinky odor’ (e.g., smell of rotten meat)](10b) ʔap’uksnun huː makʃtaɬ
ʔa–p’uks–nVnhuːPL.INO–ID–INO:IMPFVART‘The garbage stinks.’

makʃtaɬgarbage(Kung 2007:443)

In (10a) the repeated ideophone modifies the verb ʔakamin, the general “smell”
verb. However, in (10b) the ideophone is affixed with the indefinite object prefix
and suffix, which results in the derivation of an intransitive verb stem whose
meaning is based on that of the ideophone. In five morphological frames, anideophone can serve as the root of a derived verb (see Kung 2007:441–46).
Finally, Huehuetla Tepehua ideophones are subject to a process of systematic sound-symbolic phonemic alternations in which a templatic alternation
between phonemes results in a slight change in meaning. Pairs of related
ideophones, adapted from Kung (2005:13, ex. 26), are shown in (11).
(11a) kakʃ
kaks‘sound of a branch breaking’ ~‘sound of a twig snapping’(11b) p’iɬiɬip’isisiִ(11c) tѻ’eʔִtѻ’ik‘sound of light rain, sprinkling’ ~‘sound of even lighter rain, sprinkling’‘sound of a bird, chirp, tweet’ ~‘sound of a mouse, squeak’

Phoneme alternations include palato-alveolar fronting/backing [ʃ ~ s] (11a),alveolar (de)lateralization [ɬ ~ s] (11b), and mid-vowel raising/lowering [e ~ i]the challenge of olfactory ideophones

185

TABLE 3HUEHUETLA TEPEHUA PHONEMIC ALTERNATIONS
Diminutive;
Affectionate Speech

Augmentative

consonant frontingsst͡s, t͡s’k, k’
vowel raisingi, uconsonant backingʃɬࢎt‫ݕ‬, ࢎt‫’ݕ‬ʔ, *q, *q’vowel loweringe, o(11c) (see also table 3). These systematic sound-symbolic phonemic alternations are not limited to the class of ideophones; rather they occur in all wordclasses of the language and play a role in four other areas of the lexicon:
diminutive/augmentative, affectionate speech register, lexical sets, and phonemic alternations in body-part prefixes (Kung 2007:146–47).
The parts of the lexicon in which sound-symbolic phonemic alternations
play a role are similar to what Klamer (2002) has described as the different
classes of items that involve expressive semantics. In Huehuetla Tepehua,
three different consonant sets and one vowel set play a critical sound-symbolicrole in form-to-meaning mappings. Table 3 shows that consonant fronting
and vowel raising are linked to a diminutive meaning and affectionate speech
register, whereas consonant backing and vowel lowering are linked to augmentative interpretations. Similar associations have been reported in otherlanguages (e.g., Sapir 1911 for Wishram; Nichols 1971 for Western North
American languages; Ultan 1978; Haynie et al. 2014 for Australian languages).
Examples of the diminutive/augmentative contrast are given in (12); bold
font is used to indicate the alternating phonemes.
Diminutive/augmentative contrast in non-ideophones(12a) ɬoʔoʔo ‘hollow thing’ ~sukuku ‘small, hollow thing’(12b) ɬputut ‘round thing’ ~sputut ‘small, round thing’ ~potot ‘large, round thing’(12c) kiɬ ‘mouth’ ~ʔeɬ ‘big mouth’(Kung 2007:148)
In (12a) the alternations are [ɬ ~ s], [o ~ u] and [ʔ ~ k]; in (12b) [ɬ ~ s],[o ~ u]; and in (12c) [ʔ ~ k] and [i ~ e]. These examples demonstrate that thephonemic alternations shown in table 3 are productive, in that they are commonly used and may be applied to any word; however, some alternating pairs

186

international journal of american linguistics

have become lexicalized, as in (13). The semantic characteristics describedfor productive phonemic alternations are not necessarily transparent in suchlexicalized pairs.
(13a) ʔaloʔot ‘horn’, ‘antler’ ~ʔalukut ‘bone’(13b) ʃaqʃ ‘fig tree’ ~saqs ‘candy’(13c) ִtѻ’aʔaʔij ‘he breaks it’ ~t͡s’ak’aʔij ‘he bites it’(Kung 2007:153–55)
Prior to the field trip described below, our preliminary search of Kung’s
Huehuetla Tepehua lexical database (described in 2.2) produced only six
smell terms, all of which patterned like ideophones, so we hoped to elicit
further odor terms through targeted elicitation. We did not, however, expect
to find previously unattested sound-symbolic phonemic alternations in thedata; in fact, we found two patterns of phonemic alternations that neither
Kung (2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007) nor Herzog (1987) had previously described for this language.
In the first pattern, the low vowel /a/ participates in sound-symbolic alternations, as seen in (14). Note that the forms in (b) are reduplicated formsof those in (a).
(14a) ɬkak ‘spicy odor and taste’ ~ɬkuk ‘odor of lime (calcium hydroxide, cal)’(14b) ɬkakak ‘odor or flavor so spicy/strong that it will make one sneeze’ ~ɬkukuk ‘odor of peppermint’(14c) sʔah ‘rancid, sour odor’ ~sʔeh ‘delicious odor’
In (14a) and (14b), /a/ alternates with /u/, resulting in a subtle meaningchange; in (14c), /a/ alternates with /e/, producing a drastic change. Both patterns conform to the pattern of vowel raising and lowering shown in table 3. It
appears that these types of phonemic alternations are akin to what Tufvesson(2011) has described for sensory perception ideophones in Semai—that is, systematic vowel alternations lead to meaning change in formally similar words.
In the second previously undescribed alternation, the alveolar fricative /s/alternates with the alveolar affricate / ͡ts’/, shown in (15), where there is onlya slight change in meaning.
(15) saw ‘very disagreeable odor (e.g., dead animal, smelly dog)’ ~ִts’aw ‘smell of excrement, odor stronger than saw’

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

187

This pattern of (de-)affricatization is unlike any that has previously been described for this language. It is unusual for a glottalized affricate to alternatewith a fricative in this language family, and we have no explanation for thisanomaly. The two words in this alternating pair were produced by different
speakers at different times, and the formal and semantic similarities were
uncovered later when we analyzed the data. Because both form and meaning
are so similar, we include this example.
Though these two patterns have not been described previously, on revisiting
the matter we found more ideophonic examples in Kung’s lexical database.
Additional examples of vowel lowering/raising that involve the low vowel/a/ are shown in (16). The process of vowel lowering and raising is readily
applied to the high and mid vowels; however, in these examples the process
has extended to include the low vowel /a/ as well.
(16a) /e/ ~ /a/slewak ‘action of cutting something into strips with a machete’ ~slawaʔ ‘action of slipping on a wet surface’(16b) /u/ ~ /a/slum ‘the way a lizard looks when it moves (its legs move so fast
it looks like it is gliding)’ ~slam ‘the way a flashing light looks’(16c) /u/ ~ /a/ɬkuluk ‘action/sound of walking with a limp’ ~ɬkalak ‘action/sound of galloping or running’(16d) /u/ ~ /a/ɬkululu ‘the way lice move’ ~ɬkalala ‘the way a critter with pincers moves with its pincers
opened’Though no other examples of the (de-)affricatization involving the glottalized / t͡s’/ were found, we did find examples in which /s/ alternates with theplain / t͡s /, as in (17).
(17a) sam ‘sound of a small pop or splash’ ~ִtsam ‘sound of biting into something tender’(17b) sas ‘sound of glasses clinking (e.g., a toast)’ ~ִtsas ‘a loud shout’To summarize, ideophones in Huehuetla Tepehua show a number of characteristics that in combination distinguish them from other word classes in
the language. Syntactically and morphologically they pattern with manneradverbs. Phonemic alternation and reduplication allow for new word forms
to describe sensory experiences (and motion events; not in focus here). It canbe difficult to determine the underlying roots of ideophones because there is188international journal of american linguistics

much variation in patterns of reduplication and sound-symbolic alternations.
The individualized, ideolectal nature of this class of words means they are
ideal for conveying personal, particular sensory experiences in a cogent manner. At the same time, there are regular form-to-meaning mappings expressing
size (augmentative/diminutive) and speech register (affective speech). Sincesmell terminology is so little explored, it behooves us to look more closely
at how these processes operate in the olfactory domain.
2.2. Eliciting odor terms in Huehuetla Tepehua. Tepehua has been
documented in-depth by Kung, so we began by searching for odor terms
in her Huehuetla Tepehua lexical database. Kung started an unpublished
Toolbox database (filename tpwlex.db) in Shoebox in 1999. She added tothis database continuously from 1999 through 2008, and again for the monthof November 2011. This database was static from December 2011 until
August 2014 when the fieldwork reported here was carried out and was
only modified as a result of this fieldtrip. It consists of some 6,150 lexemes
which stem from translation elicitation, including ideophone-specific elicitation that targeted the visual and auditory domains, as well as conversationand natural monologue texts. The database includes 528 ideophones, ofwhich 213 were ideophones of sounds, 124 of actions, 104 of vocalizations (including animal calls, cries, songs, ways to call animals), and 21
for sensations. However, prior to the study carried out in August 2014 anddescribed here, only six were specific to olfaction. From this, one could
conclude that olfaction is not very salient to this community and leave it atthat. However, given the previous reports of olfactory terminology in theselanguages (Aschmann 1946; Santiago Francisco 2009; Enríquez Andrade
2010; McFarland 2010), as well as the fact that we found some olfactoryideophones in Huehuetla Tepehua, this conclusion seemed premature. 3 So
we turned to a different method to elicit potential odor vocabulary.
We presented 20 native speakers of Huehuetla Tepehua with 18 different
odors, using Sniffin’ Sticks (Hummel et al. 1997). These are marker pens
containing an odorant instead of ink. Participants smell the odor by removing
the marker cap and sniffing the tip of the pen. The Sniffin’ Sticks contained
3 In earlier research, Kung elicited ideophones with two different speakers by taking everyday objects and using them to make sounds (e.g., shaking a box of paperclips, popping rubberbands, tapping pencils on the table) and enacting different manners of motion (e.g., hopping on
one foot, limping, walking with big steps). One speaker spontaneously started providing terms
to describe how people, animals, fish, and other things in nature move. Interspersed with theseterms were ideophones that describe the way light or water plays on various surfaces. The terms
collected with these two speakers were checked with a third speaker and were approved. During this type of elicitation, speakers did not spontaneously produce any ideophones for smell or
taste. The few olfactory terms collected come from translation elicitation and one was produced
in an oral history narrative.

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

189

odors that correspond to the following “odor objects”: apple, banana, clove,
eucalyptus, garlic, lavender, leather, lemon, lilac, mushroom, pineapple, peppermint, rose, sesame, smoked meat, soy sauce, turpentine, and vinegar. The
sticks were presented one at a time in a fixed random order. We waited atleast 30 seconds between presenting speakers with different odors to avoid
olfactory fatigue. Participants smelled each stick for as long as they wanted.
They were then asked in Tepehua “How does it smell?” (Taas ʔakamin?).
We recorded the responses with an audio-recorder and with pencil and paper. Before working with speakers, they were informed about the protocol,and consent was obtained. Upon completing the task, we debriefed speakers
regarding the experiment and asked if they could think of any other smells
not included in the task. We also asked follow-up questions regarding terms
not previously documented.
Working with real odorants in the form of Sniffin’ Sticks was successful
in eliciting a rich set of olfactory terms not previously attested, many ofwhich show ideophonic properties. This is noteworthy since the database ofideophones was of considerable size with 528 terms overall. After this elicitation study, the database went from having merely 6 olfactory terms—allideophones—to 45 total forms, including ideophones. This suggests that thecurrent cross-linguistic paucity of documented olfactory language cannot be
trusted.
Of the terms that were elicited, some refer to tastes as well as odors. This
likely reflects the physiological conflation of these senses. Chemosensory
researchers distinguish between “taste” proper (i.e., sweet, sour, bitter, salty,
umami) and “flavor,” which combines taste and texture with olfaction to
produce the sensation we experience in the mouth (Smith 2012). The olfactory system is triggered both by sniffing (“orthonasal olfaction”) and whenan object enters the mouth: molecules travel to the olfactory system throughthe back of the oral cavity (“retronasal olfaction”). It is, therefore, perhaps
expected to see a close connection between these senses (Shepherd 2006). For
our purposes, the distinction between taste and flavor is not crucial and, assuch, we will use the generic term “taste” to refer to the sensory experiencein the mouth.
In response to the odor naming task, speakers used olfactory terms 59%of the time (see table 4). 4 On the other hand, 36% of responses to the task
involved a source-based term or expression to say that a Sniffin’ Stick smelledlike VapoRub, for instance. Only one participant gave an evaluative response,
indicating that a Sniffin’ Stick smelled “nice.” In the first part of the protocol,
speakers simply named the odor or its source in response to smelling each
4 To consult audio recordings of the words listed in table 4, see the following record in AILLA,
https://www.ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla%3A255668, which may be freely accessed
and used according to AILLA’s user guidelines (https://www.ailla.utexas.org/).

190

international journal of american linguistics
TABLE 4HUEHUETLA TEPEHUA OLFACTORY TERMS

IdeophonicGroup
Odor Term
1

2

ʔuli
ʔulilik’uli
k’uliksk’uliࢎt‫ݕ‬aktࢎ ‫ݕ‬i

34ࢎt‫’ݕ‬ajaːwࢎt‫ݕ‬iːʃ

5
6

hakʃ
kan

7
8
9

10

kani
kaninik’us 2ɬiːt͡siɬkakɬkakakɬkakakaɬqaqa ~ ɬʔaʔaɬkukɬkukukɬkihɬkehɬk’ih ~ ɬk’ihni
sʔeh
ʃʔeh

11

maːʃ

12

meʔe ~ meqe

13

miːs

14

moʔoʔ

15

mukuk
p’oʔʃ
p’uks
p’ukʃ

Description
Delicious smell, smell of flowers
Delicious smell
A beautiful, rich odor like perfume or flowers
A rich, beautiful odor like lavender
A beautiful odor (floral or citrus)
UNDETERMINED MEANING; elicited as a response to Sniffin’ Stickpineapple odor
Flavor and/or scent of flavored water
Smell of urine or excrement (human or animal), or of a person
who does not bathe
Smell and flavor of guaxi 1
Delicious odor of free range chicken that eats corn instead ofchicken feed; (also fruity odors)
A delicious odor; a beautiful odor
Elicited as a response to Sniffin’ Stick clove odor
A beautiful odor
A really bad odor
Spicy odor and taste
Odor or flavor so spicy/strong that it will make one sneeze
Elicited as a response to Sniffin’ Stick eucalyptus odor
Spicy odor or flavor, but not as strong as lhkak
Odor of lime (calcium hydroxide)
Odor of peppermint
Delicious, savory odor like when shrimp or mushrooms areboiling, the smell of coffee, recently wet earth
Odor even more delicious than ɬkih
Delicious odor of food, pleasant odor like incense, flowers
Delicious odor (e.g., of honey or sugar cooking), richly cooked
food, frying meat, beans, pork skins, ripe avocado
Unpleasant smell like skunk, human farts, burning plastic, hair,feathers, horns, bones, chile or cloth, tobacco, garbage
Something that has gone bad, similar to p’uks, but not as bad ofan odorSmell of raw milk, raw beef, sheep’s meat, or beef when it’scooking
Smell of a particular herb, women’s makeup or perfume, smellof badger
Smell of something that has gone bad, it makes you nauseous,
the taste of something that is off, not flavorful, or lacks salt
Pleasant odor, perfume, flowers, a clean person
Mildew odor, damp clothes that didn’t dry well, rotten fruit, wet
towel, wet dog
A terrible smell like dirty diaper, rotten meat, dead animal
Smell of rotten woodthe challenge of olfactory ideophones

16

sʔah
sʔahaʔ

17
18

skah
sʔoʔo
saʔsi

19

ɬakɬ(i)saw

20t͡s’awskakak

21
22
23

suːn
ʃuːn
taː
t’oɬ
t’uɬ

191

Rancid, sour odor (e.g., of a person that does not bathe, rotten
citrus fruit)
A bitter smell, like zest from the skin of citrus fruit, the smell oflemonsA sour odor, like sweat or fermentation
Salty taste and odor
Sweet odor and taste, like fruit (was used to describe various
Sniffin’ Sticks)
Bittersweet odor and taste of a ripe fruit
A very disagreeable odor, so stinky it is unbearable (e.g., of ananimal or person dead for several days), extremely smelly dog
Smell of excrement, stronger odor than saw
Strong odor that takes three days to disappear (e.g., smell ofskunk, gas, a green cockroach)
A bitter (savory) odor
A bitter odor, smell of burnt food
UNDETERMINED MEANING; elicited as a response to Sniffin’ Stickvinegar, soy sauce and rose odors
Sharp odor, chalky or pasty odor
A disgusting odor like animal urine or excrement, cold and raw
egg, raw meat of an animal that eats feed instead of corn

1 Guaxi is an edible pod, likely from a tree in the Leucaena genus.
2 An anonymous reviewer accurately pointed out that k’us ‘beautiful, pretty’ is the diminutive form of thehistorical Huehuetla Tepehua *q’oʃ(i) (modern form ʔoʃ) ‘good’. However, in Huehuetla Tepehua k’us has lexicalized to the point that Huehuetla Tepehua speakers do not immediately recognize it as the diminutive of ʔoʃ.

Sniffin’ Stick; they were not asked any follow-up questions at this time.
However, in the debriefing part of the protocol, speakers would name odors
and describe them, sometimes guessing at the possible sources too, as shownin (18) wherein the speaker was guessing that a sweaty child could be thesource of the odor named by sʔah, which directly precedes ʔakamin, thegeneral smell verb ‘smell, give off an odor’.
(18) naː waː sʔah ʔakamin huː ʃʔasʔat’anaː
waː sʔah ʔakamin huː ʃ–ʔasʔat’a
smell
ART
3POS–childvery FOC ID‘The child smells very sour (e.g., from sweat).’[sʔah ‘sour, sweaty smell’](Kung and O’Meara 2014:8)
Table 4 provides all olfactory terms elicited by the Sniffin’ Sticks andfollow-up interviews. The semantic characterization of each term in table 4
is gleaned from information obtained from consultants in the follow-up interviews. Shading, or lack thereof, in the table illustrates groups of terms (inno particular order) that are related by patterns of sound-symbolic phonemic
alternation or reduplication. In general, these odor terms undergo the same

192

international journal of american linguistics

processes of reduplication and phonemic alternations previously describedfor ideophones (Kung 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; see 2.1). In some cases,
a single lexeme is listed for a group; it is quite plausible that related terms
have yet to be documented.
It has been claimed that ideophones express highly specific meanings (e.g.,
Dingemanse 2011:228). Semantically specific words can be defined as words
with more “bits of information” or “components of meaning,” and correspondingly they have smaller extensions (Lyons 1968:454) because their larger
number of meaning components means their reference is more restricted. The
odor terms in table 4 appear to be semantically specific in this sense, sinceutterances with these terms have a limited extension relative to utterances withthe general smell verb ‘akamin ‘smell, give off an odor’. Although these terms
are semantically specific, they do not refer to a particular odor source, which
is similar to what has been described for olfactory predicates in the Aslian
languages (Majid and Burenhult 2014; Wnuk and Majid 2014).
Finally, previous studies of ideophone-rich languages have describedideophones as being challenging to elicit (e.g., Samarin 1967; Mithun 1982;
Blench 2010). Although we may not have elicited an exhaustive list of odor
vocabulary in Huehuetla Tepehua, using odor stimuli as an elicitation tool,
we obtained a large corpus of odor terms that had previously been undocumented. However, although the procedure used here was helpful in eliciting
terms, it did not provide a complete picture for understanding the semanticsof the terms it generated. To supplement, we conducted follow-up elicitation
after the Sniffin’ Sticks task using both free-listing and general elicitation,
which gave us further insight into meaning distinctions of the terms used. We
acknowledge the limitations of our current data, but combining these different methods of elicitation provided a more complete picture than using only
one, or none at all, and provides a firm foundation for further investigation.
2.3. Form-to-meaning mapping in Huehuetla Tepehua odor terms.
Phonemic alternations in Huehuetla Tepehua words can be interpreted indifferent ways depending on the specific lexical field under consideration.
In the context of ideophones that refer to sensorial experiences, phonemic
alternations can indicate a change in some aspect of the percept, including achange in the perceived intensity. A generalization emerges among perception ideophones whereby the same sounds associated with the augmentative(consonant backing and vowel lowering) shown in table 3 can be interpreted
to indicate a more intense sensation; sounds associated with the diminutive(consonant fronting and vowel raising), in contrast, can be interpreted as lessintense. This is seen in (19) and (20), wherein consonant backing and vowel
lowering, respectively, are linked to more intense perceptual experiences in
the olfactory domain.

the challenge of olfactory ideophones(19) /s/ ~ /ʃ/suːn
ʃuːn, ʃoːn

193

‘a bitter odor or taste’ ~‘a bitter odor or taste stronger than suːn’(20) /i/ ~ /e/ɬkih ‘a delicious odor’ (e.g., coffee) ~ɬkeh ‘an odor even more delicious than ɬkih’
However, although most odor terms align with this generalization, counterexamples are available, as in (21), where consonant backing is linked to a lessintense perceptual experience, and (22), where it is impossible (for cultural
outsiders) to determine if one smell is more intense than the other.
(21) /k/ ~ /q/ɬkak‘a spicy odor or taste’ ~ɬqaqa, ɬqaq ‘a spicy odor or flavor, but not as strong as ɬkak’(22) /k/ ~ /ʔ/skah ‘a sour odor, like sweat or fermentation’ ~sʔah ‘rancid, sour odor, like a person who does not bathe orrotten citrus fruit’
Nevertheless, it is unequivocally the case that sound-symbolic alternations inodor terms produce changes in meaning, as seen in the previous examples,and in (23).
(23) /u/ ~ /o /, /k/ ~ /ʔ/, /s/ ~ /ʃ/p’oʔʃ ‘odor of mildew, damp clothing, wet dog, rotten fruit’ ~p’uks ‘terrible smell like dirty diaper, rotten meat, dead animal’ ~p’ukʃ ‘smell of rotten wood’
Furthermore, we observed some phonemic alternations that lexicalize differing hedonic values or pleasantness between contrasting pairs, as in (24) and(25). In (24) there is both vowel lowering and consonant backing, whereas in(25) we see only consonant backing.
(24) /u/~/o / and /k/~/ʔ/mukuku ‘a pleasant odor’ (e.g., perfume) ~moʔoʔo ‘an unpleasant odor’ (e.g., spoiled food)(25) /s/ ~ /ʃ/sʔeh ‘a delicious odor’ (e.g., rich food being cooked) ~ʃʔeh ‘a really bad odor’ (e.g., hair, bone, etc., burning)
Contrasts in hedonic values in ideophones have been observed in other languages, specifically in Ewe, a Kwa language of West Africa, where it ismarked by a tonal contrast: lílílílílí ‘nice good sweet smell’ (high tone) vs.
lìlìlìlì ‘very bad smell’ (Ameka 2001:30).

194international journal of american linguistics
TABLE 5HEDONIC VALUE SHIFTS IN HUEHUETLA TEPEHUAEXPRESSED BY PHONEMIC ALTERNATIONS
Pleasant

Unpleasantconsonant frontingsskvowel raisinguconsonant backing
ʃ
ɬ
ʔ, *q
vowel loweringoIn these Tepehua data, we also observed phonemic alternations that lexicalize only slight differences in hedonic values, such as the contrast pair foundin (26).
(26) /s/~/ɬ/ and /k/~/ʔ/saʔsi ‘a sweet smell or taste’ ~ɬakɬi ‘a bittersweet smell or taste’Yet another pattern emerges from many of the lexical sets: consonant fronting and vowel raising are generally linked to pleasant smells and consonantbacking and vowel lowering are linked to unpleasant smells, summarizedin table 5. In comparing multiple West African languages, Westermann(1927:328; 1937:209–10) noted a very similar pattern in high vowels and“hard” consonants mapping onto meanings of pleasant smells and spicy intense tastes, whereas low, deep vowels and “soft” consonants map onto meanings of repulsive smells and insipid tastes.
In some theories of olfaction, odors are primarily perceived according totheir pleasantness (e.g., Khan et al. 2007; Yeshurun and Sobel 2010), and there
appears to be a direct link between the molecular structure of an odorant and its
perceived pleasantness (Keller et al. 2017). The Huehuetla Tepehua data seem
perplexing in this context. If an olfactory lexeme is picking out a specific odor
quality, it is not clear how a “sound-symbolic” phonemic alternation can signal
a completely different odor quality. We suggest the bridging context (Wilkins
1981) contributing to the interpretation of pleasant odor qualities could bethrough the affectionate speech register. Phonemic alternations that indicate affection come to specifically indicate positive odor, and the oppositional contrast
leads to an interpretation of negative odor. Although plausible, this account stillleaves some puzzles. It is not clear how the specific formal contrast leads tothe specific positive or negative odor-quality meaning. For example, in (25) thephonemic alternation from sʔeh to ʃʔeh changes the meaning from ‘a delicious

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

195

odor (e.g., rich food being cooked)’ to ‘a really bad odor (e.g., hair, bone, etc.,
burning)’. We might expect the contrast to be more transparent between a pleasant and an unpleasant odor, but we find a more specific and idiosyncratic meaning opposition. Similarly, p’uks ‘a terrible smell like dirty diaper, rotten meat’contrasts with p’ukʃ ‘smell of rotten wood’; t’oɬ ‘a sharp odor’ contrasts witht’uɬ ‘a disgusting odor’. The specific interpretation is not always transparent. The
question then becomes to what extent these alternations are arbitrary—a matter of language- and culture-specific interpretation—or sound-symbolic, suchthat they reveal how forms map onto the olfactory system capturing universal
notions of contrast. The data are simply not sufficient to adjudicate the matterat present; however, this would be a promising avenue to explore in the futuresince it would shed new light onto sound-symbolism and olfaction.
During the Sniffin’ Sticks protocol and follow-up elicitation, we also observed two patterns of reduplication that were previously described by Kung
(2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007)—specifically, the patterns of partial reduplication, wherein the final syllable undergoes reduplication (27a), and iterative
reduplication, wherein the final syllable is reduplicated iteratively (27b).
(27a) tatࢎ ‫ ݕ‬huː miːsiː k’ulili ʔakamintatࢎ ‫ ݕ‬huː miːsiː k’uli ʔakaminsmell
like ART pápalo ID‘It smells good like pápalo (an herb, Porophyllum coloratum).’[k’uli ‘good smell like a flower or perfume’](Kung and O’Meara 2014:14)(27b) waː kaninini ʔakamin naː ʔalaːʃuːʃwaː kani ʔakamin naː ʔalaːʃuːʃ
FOC IDsmell
ART orange‘It smells really delicious, really orangey.’[kani ‘delicious smell’](Kung and O’Meara 2014:45)
Similarly, while reduplication, in general, can have an iterative meaning, inthe sensorial domain it can be interpreted as an intensifier. So the reduplicatedform in (28) indicates a more intense odor or taste than the unreduplicatedform.
(28) ɬkakɬkakak‘spicy odor or taste’ ~‘even more spicy odor or taste than ɬkak’

Interestingly, repetition of the ideophone did not emerge during the Sniffin’
Sticks protocol or follow-up questions, nor did we specifically try to elicit
it. This might be explained by the fact that total repetition is associated with

196

international journal of american linguistics

iterativity in punctual events, which would not apply to odors since they
behave more like states. 5
To summarize the general phonemic alternations in odor terms, we see thatthey are formally the same as the alternations found in other sensory domains.
Reduplication is linked to subtle changes in the percept, particularly intensification of the sensorial experience. Although phonemic alternations in ideophones are the same as those found in other arenas (i.e., affectionate speech,
diminutive/augmentative), the changes in meaning appear more complex.
There are a final few remarks to be made about the semantics of odor termsin Tepehua. In his formative study, Aschmann (1946) grouped odor terms in
Totonac formally on the basis of their shared basic smell roots, and he provided a semantic label for each group. For instance, odor terms beginningwith pṵ were grouped as ‘bad smells’ (see 3.2). There were also ‘vegetationand good smells’, ‘medicinal and aromatic smells’, ‘body and animal smells’,‘sour smells’, and ‘smells that leave a taste in the mouth’. In table 4, we also
attempted to draw on the formal similarity of odor terms in Tepehua, but wefound a “smell root” does not necessarily have a common meaning component,
especially when a phonemic alternation changes the hedonic value of the term(see examples 24 and 25). In such cases, it is not clear what the common
meaning of the “smell root” would be, were an abstract form to be proposed.
This also points to the fact that there is no direct relationship between theterm’s form and the odor quality expressed by that term.
Nevertheless, some generalizations emerge if we consider all lexemes; certain categories of odors appear salient: fecal and/or rotten odors (e.g., saw‘stinky odor’, ͡ts’aw ‘smell of excrement’, t’uɬ ‘disgusting odor’, ִtѻiːʃ ‘smell of
excrement or urine’, p’oʔʃ ‘mildew odor’, p’uks ‘terrible odor’, p’ukʃ ‘smell ofrotten wood’, maːʃ ‘smell of something gone bad’, moʔoʔ ‘smell of somethingthat has gone bad’, sʔah ‘rancid or sour odor’), aromatic or perfume-like odors(e.g., ʔuli ‘delicious odor’, ʔulili ‘delicious odor’, k’uli ‘beautiful odor like
perfume’, k’ulik ‘beautiful odor like lavender’, sk’uli ‘beautiful odor’, k’us
‘beautiful odor’, miːs ‘smell of an herb, badger, etc.’, ɬk’ih ‘delicious odor’),edibility and deliciousness (e.g., saʔsi ‘sweet odor’, ɬakɬ(i) ‘bittersweet odor’,sʔeh ‘delicious odor’, ɬkih ‘delicious, savory odor’, ɬkeh ‘very delicious odor’,ɬk’ih ‘delicious odor’, hakʃ ‘smell of an edible pod’, ִtѻ’ajaːw ‘smell of flavoured
water’, meʔe ‘smell of raw milk, etc.’) and finally inedibility (e.g., sʔah ‘rancid,sour odor’, skah ‘sour odor’, ʃuːn ‘bitter odor’, maːʃ ‘smell of something thathas gone bad’, t’uɬ ‘disgusting odor’), which contrasts with the edible set ofterms. The proposed categories differ from the ones that Aschmann (1946)
identified, but both require further grounding in data from speakers. Finally,
5 We thank David Beck for suggesting the possible explanation for why total repetition did
not occur in this context.

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

197

ideophones have been characterized as being depictive of specific sensory
imagery (Dingemanse 2012). This seems intuitive in the case of sound andmotion ideophones, which can invite interlocutors to imagine a particularsound or motion illustrated by an ideophone using either imagic iconicity inwhich a form depicts a sound or relative iconicity in which different levels ofintensity are mapped onto vowel space (Dingemanse 2012:663). It is less clear
how speakers invite interlocutors to imagine a particular smell based on theway an ideophone sounds. In addition, sound-symbolic phonemic alternations
provide information about odor pleasantness but do not indicate odor quality.
Further work is necessary to disentangle the systematic sound-symbolic natureof olfactory ideophones from the “roots” or “templates” that provide further
lexical content regarding odor quality.
3. Olfactory lexicon in other Totonac-Tepehua languages. The
quantity and quality of odor terms in Huehuetla Tepehua is not somethingunique to this language, as we indicated in the introduction (1). In fact, all
Totonac-Tepehua languages have numerous odor terms that make significant
use of phonemic alternations, and many of the languages are documented as
being rich in ideophones. This has been illustrated for both branches of thelanguage family: Totonac (McQuown 1990 [1940]; Aschmann 1946; Bishop
1984; Levy 1987, 2004; Enríquez Andrade 2004, 2010; Beck 2007, 2008;
Santiago Francisco 2009; McFarland 2010) and Tepehua (Herzog 1987;
Watters 1988; Smythe 2003; Kung 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; Davletshinn.d.). Although Watters does not state explicitly that Tlachichilco Tepehua
has ideophones, he describes the core adverbs as exhibiting “reduplicationand ideophonic resonance” (1988:356) and states that the adverbial syntactic position is also the position in which “imitative sounds may occur”(1988:360); all of these behaviors are characteristic of ideophones in thepreviously mentioned languages. More specifically, not all previous descriptions of Totonac-Tepehua languages have employed the term ideophone. To
be exact, only Huehuetla Tepehua (Herzog 1987; Kung 2005, 2006a, 2006b,
2007), Filomeno Mata Totonac (Santiago Francisco 2009; McFarland 2010),
and Upper Necaxa Totonac (Beck 2007, 2008) have been described as having ideophones, and of these only Huehuetla Tepehua and Filomeno Mata
Totonac include odor terms among the ideophones. Furthermore, although
Beck (2007, 2008) describes Upper Necaxa Totonac as having ideophones,
smell terms do not show the morphosyntactic behavior of items in this class.
It is outside the scope of the present work to argue that all the TotonacTepehua cognates presented herein are in fact ideophones; instead our intention
is to collate, for the first time, existing olfactory terminology from the TotonacTepehua language family and show how a comparative perspective sheds
further light onto the nature of sensory language more generally (Burenhult

198

international journal of american linguistics

and Majid 2011). First, we provide the necessary background about the language family (3.1) followed by comparative data from Huehuetla Tepehua
and seven other Totonac-Tepehua languages (3.2).
3.1. Totonac-Tepehua language family. Opinions differ on the statusof the Totonac-Tepehua language family. Campbell, Kaufman and SmithStark (1986) and MacKay and Trechsel (2015) describe it as an isolate
family in Mesoamerica, whereas Brown et al. (2011) include it in the larger
Totozoquean language family. It is undisputed that Totonac-Tepehua has
two main branches—Totonac and Tepehua—and that the Tepehua branch
consists of three distinct varieties: Huehuetla Tepehua (tee) spoken in Hidalgo, Mexico (Kung 2007), classified as Southern Tepehua (Lewis et al.
2016) or tepehua del sur (INALI 2008); Pisaflores Tepehua (tpp) spoken
in Veracruz, Mexico (MacKay and Trechsel 2015), classified as Northern
Tepehua (Lewis et al. 2016) or tepehua del norte (INALI 2008); and Tlachichilco Tepehua (tpt) spoken in Veracruz, Mexico (Watters 1988), classified
as Western Tepehua (Lewis et al. 2016) or tepehua del oeste (INALI 2008).
The National Institute of Indigenous Languages in Mexico (INALI 2008)
reports 7,511 speakers of Tepehua over the age of five, using 2005 national
census data (INEGI 2005).
Early work on the Totonac branch suggested at least four varieties: (i) Papantla Totonac (top), spoken along the Gulf Coast of Veracruz; (ii) Northernor North-Central Totonac (tos), 6 between Poza Rica, Veracruz, and northern
Puebla; (iii) South-Central or Sierra Totonac (too), Sierra Norte de Puebla; and(iv) Misantla Totonac (tlc), the southernmost variety (McQuown 1990 [1940];
Smith-Stark 1983; MacKay 1999; MacKay and Trechsel 2015). Similarly,
Brown et al. (2011) recognize four varieties: (i) Misantla, (ii) Northern, (iii)
Sierra, and (iv) Lowland, and they point out the conflicting analyses of thespecific divisions among the last three groups, which they call Central Totonac. INALI (2008), on the other hand, classifies Totonac into seven language
groups: (i) South-Central Totonac (totonaco central del sur), (ii) Necaxa River
Totonac (totonaco del río Necaxa; tku), (iii) Coastal Totonac (totonaco de lacosta, Papantla Totonac; top), (iv) High Central Totonac (totonaco central
alto, includes Filomeno Mata Totonac; tlp), (v) Totonac of the Xinolatépetl
Mountain (totonaco del cerro Xinolatépetl, Huachinango, Puebla and surrounding area; tqt), (vi) North-Central Totonac (totonaco central del norte;too), and (vii) Southeastern Totonac (totonaco del sureste, Mistantla Totonac;tlc). The specific details of the linguistic classifications of this language family
are not relevant to this study.
6 The ISO language codes for the Totonac languages do not easily match up with the established linguistic divisions.

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

199

TABLE 6
NUMBER OF ODOR TERMS REPORTED IN TOTONAC-TEPEHUA LANGUAGES
Language

Number ofOdor Terms

Huehuetla Tepehua

45

Tlachichilco Tepehua
Pisaflores Tepehua
Filomeno Mata Totonac

24
9
21

Papantla Totonac

21

Sierra Totonac
Misantla Totonac
Upper Necaxa Totonac

23
3
17

Source(s)Kung 2005, 2007; Kung’s database; current
study
Watters 1988
MacKay, p.c.
Santiago Francisco 2009; McFarland 2010;
MacKay, p.c.
Enríquez Andrade 2010
Levy 1987, p.c.
Aschmann 1946, 1983, 2000
MacKay, p.c.
Beck 2011, p.c.

3.2. The olfactory lexicons in Totonac-Tepehua. Although many studies of Totonac-Tepehua languages describe phonemic alternations, and many
also note an ideophone word class, many of them have little to say about
the olfactory domain, whether as part of the class of ideophones or not.
We suspect this is likely oversight or underreporting rather than a real gap.
For now, we have compiled existing published examples from Tlachichilco
Tepehua, Filomeno Mata Totonac, Papantla Totonac, Upper Necaxa Totonac,
and Sierra Totonac (see citations in table 6), alongside the data from thestudy described here in 2.2, and unpublished data on Upper Necaxa Totonac(David Beck, p.c.), Papantla Totonac (Paulette Levy, p.c.), Misantla Totonac
and Filomeno Mata Totonac (Carolyn MacKay, p.c.), and Pisaflores Tepehua(Carolyn MacKay, p.c.). The Huehuetla Tepehua data showed considerable
overlap between olfactory and gustatory terms, so we consider both domains
for completeness. This preliminary examination produces some intriguing
results, as we show below.
Table 6 provides an estimate of the number of odor terms reported in various sources. The counts treat each phonemic alternation of a similar form
separately (as in table 4; 2.2).
Our comparison of the odor terms across these languages shows that the
Totonac and Tepehua languages share similar sound-symbolic phonemic alternation processes. In fact, there appear to be cognate odor terms that display
both form and meaning correspondences. This is particularly striking in thedata in table 7, where cognate terms for excrement and rotten meat smells
are given.

200

international journal of american linguistics
TABLE 7TOTONAC-TEPEHUA COGNATES FOR ‘ROTTEN/FECAL SMELL’

CognateTermp’uks

Object Exemplars which
Emit This Odor

Language

SourceHuehuetla
Tepehua
Tlachichilco
Tepehua
Pisaflores
Tepehua
Papantla Totonac

current study

p’uks

dirty diaper, rotten meat, deadanimalexcrement and rotten meatp’ukʃaexcrement, dead animal, cedarpṵksasomething rotten, decomposing,garbage, excrement, dead or wet
animals
excrement, rotten meat, pestilence, Filomeno Mata
dirty paws
Totonacexcrement
Misantla Totonac
putrid, smelling of rot (meat, food, Upper Necaxa
propane)Totonacpuksa
pṵksapṵksa̰Watters 1988
Carolyn MacKay, p.c.
Enríquez Andrade 2010

Santiago Francisco 2009
Carolyn MacKay, p.c.
David Beck, p.c.

More generally, we found some close cognates in the olfactory domain
across Totonac and Tepehua languages in which the forms are clearly related,
and these are shown in table 8. To find these cognates, we used as a starting
point groups of Huehuetla Tepehua odor terms that are formally similar. We
then searched for cognate forms in other Totonac and Tepehua languages
using the sources cited in table 6. In doing so, we found many cognates in
Totonac languages that were not produced by Huehuetla Tepehua speakers
during the Sniffin’ Sticks protocol or follow-up elicitation described in 2.2,
and these terms are listed at the end of the table in rows 16–18. We haveorganized the table such that the odors for which we found cognates acrossall languages—both Tepehua and Totonac—appear at the top of the table.
Rows 1 and 2 are completely filled in whereas rows 3–10 have progressively
fewer cognates. Rows 11–15 show Tepehua-only cognates, and rows 16–18
have Totonac-only cognates.
As illustrated in table 8, some odor terms in Huehuetla Tepehua have cognate forms in other Totonac-Tepehua languages where both form and meaning
match. There is an impressive number of correspondences here across theolfactory lexicon, making a strong case against claims that the domain of
smell is ineffable. Although not all of the terms across the sample have beenclassified as ideophones in the original sources, many have explicitly been
identified as such, which is remarkable considering the previously entertained
claim that ideophones are highly malleable (Lanham 1960 as cited in Childs
1994). The longevity of these terms belies such a claim.
Although there are impressive correspondences in olfactory terms acrosslanguages, unsurprisingly not all cognate terms share meaning. For example,

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

201

the Filomeno Mata Totonac term ɬkunka is used for the following smells: raw
meat, water that has been left standing for a while, broth after its first boil,
egg, the edge of a blade that has not been washed very well, the edge of amachete if it has gotten wet or if it was used to cut meat, oxidized metal, or
unwashed grain (Santiago Francisco 2009; McFarland 2010). However, thesame term, ɬkunka, in Papantla Totonac is used to describe the smell of breast
milk, the smell of opossum and dog, or the smell of urine or sweat (Enríquez
Andrade 2010:141).
We found no cognates at all for numerous odor terms in Huehuetla Tepehua. These terms are shown in table 9 and are grouped based on the generalmeaning of the odor terms.
As noted earlier, many terms can be used for both olfactory and gustatory
modalities. This is true also of some of the forms given in table 8. To gain
better purchase on the data, we specifically pulled out the taste terms acrossthe language sample. The shaded cells in table 10 indicate terms that can beused in both smell and taste domains; 7 unshaded cells indicate terms used
for taste (according to the relevant data source). A cursory glance at table 10
reveals a striking amount of stability in cognate terms for taste.
If cognate forms across language varieties are indicators of longevity of
categories, then some intriguing patterns are suggested by the data in tables
8 and 10. First, almost all languages appear to have considerable overlap in
cognate forms for taste, more so than for olfaction. This suggests olfactory
categories may be more variable than taste categories. Second, among the odor
terms, certain categories recur. For example, there are cognate forms acrossTotonac-Tepehua languages used to describe the smell of rotten meat or excrement (see table 7) and a strong, unpleasant odor, which was exemplified by
the edible pod and seeds from the guaxi (or guaje) tree (see hakʃ in table 8).
Various explanations could be entertained for the longevity of taste terms
and relative instability of olfactory terms across related languages. One possibility is that these differences mirror cultural or environmental factors. If
sensory vocabulary is tied to its cultural niche, then similarities found in
culinary practices across the Totonac and Tepehua peoples is a possible explanation for the observed stability in the taste domain.
This line of reasoning suggests olfactory categories should also be similar
across these languages: the same (or very similar) material culture properties
are found in both groups, and there are very few differences in food, agriculture, technology, or ritual practices (Williams García 1963, 1972). However,that is not the case. Olfactory environments vary considerably (Majid et al.
7 There are likely more cognate correspondences and more overlap between tastes and smells
than shown here. Unfortunately, not all sources indicate if the terms are used for both taste andsmell, and it is quite likely that terms were not checked for both domains of use. This would bea matter for future detailed investigation.

6

5

4

3

2

1

H Tep

moʔoʔ,
mukuk

p’uks,p’ukʃ,p’oʔʃ,

hakʃ

sʔeh,
ɬkih,
ɬkeh,
ɬk’ih
Sweet fragrant odor, like fruit saʔs(i),ɬakɬ(i)A bitter odor
suːn,
ʃuːn

Strong (unpleasant) odor,
including guaxi, animal
fat or by-products, garlic,
onions, body odor
Mildew/mold/ mushrooms,
damp, rotten/decaying
fruit or meat, excrement,
dead animal
Odor of something that hasgone bad or unflavorful,
raw meat OR pleasantfloral, herbal or fruity
smells odor
Delicious odor (can beof savory food, but not
exclusively)

Description of General
Meaning of Odor Term
GroupsTl Tep

sun

saqsi

sʔeh,
ɬk’ih,
ʃk’ih

moq

p’uks

haks,
haqɬ

ɬakɬiːh,
ɬakɬi

ɬkih

p’uks,p’ukʃhaʔɬ

PF Tepseqsi,
sḛqsiʃuːni,
ʃṵːniɬkiha,skihamoq(o),
muks(u),muksun,mukɬ(u)haks(a),hakʃ(a),haqɬ(a),haqʃapuksa,
pukɬa,poqʃa,FM TotTABLE 8TOTONAC-TEPEHUA OLFACTORY COGNATESSi Totʃṵːnsa̰qsḭ

mo̰ːqo̰n,mṵːkṵn,mṵːksṵn,mo̰qʃṵn,mṵːkɬṵnskḭha,
sqa̰ha,ʃqa̰hahaksa,
hakʃa,haqɬa,haqʃapṵksa,pṵkɬa,po̰qʃaPa Totʃunsqiha,
ʃqahamuːqṵn,muːksṵn,muːkɬṵnpṵksa,po̰qʃa,po̰qɬahakʃa,
haksa

Mi Totpṵksahaksa,
hakʃa1mo̰ːʔo̰,mo̰ʔsan,mṵksṵxa̰ksa̰,xa̰ksan,xa̰kʃa̰,xa̰kʃanpo̰ʔʃ,po̰ʔʃa̰,pṵksa̰UN TotStrong odor like skunk, gas, skakak
green cockroach, potato
peel, orange peel, ginger,
chile
Odor of raw milk, raw beef, meʔe ~ meqe
sheep’s meat, or beef whenit’s cooking
Rancid, sour or bitter odorsʔah,sʔahaʔ,skah
Unpleasant smell, burningʃʔehplastic, hair, feathers,
horns, bones, chile or
cloth, tobacco, garbage,
grass, crops; skunk
Smell of urine or excrement ࢎt‫ݕ‬iːʃ(human or animal), or of aperson who does not bathe
Sharp odor, potentiallyt’oɬ,disgusting (e.g., animalt’uɬ
excrement, urine, blood)

9

14

13

12

11

10

8

Spicy odor (of varying
ɬkak,degrees, including calcium
ɬkakak,oxide, eucalyptus andɬkakaka,
peppermint)
ɬqaqa ~
ɬʔaʔa,
ɬkuk,ɬkukukSalty odorsʔoʔ(o)7t’uɬࢎt‫ݕ‬iːʃ, t͡siːʃ,ࢎt‫ݕ‬iʃt’uːst͡siːs

ʃʔeh

sʔah

ʃʔeh

skah

sʔoʔoq,sʔoʔo,
sk’uk’uk,
ʃk’uk’uk2
sqaqaq,ɬkakakɬkaksqaːqaqsqoːq,sqoqo

ɬkak(a)sqo̰qoɬkakamikʃinBad, sour odor of sweat,
leather, acid
Metalic, rancid odor likeblood, snake, raw meat,edge of dirty blade used to
cut meat

17

miːs

H Tep
mis

Tl TepPF Tepʃkṵta, ʃqṵtaskunk(a), ɬkunk(a), skunka, ɬkunka,ɬqonq(a)ɬqonqa, sqonqa,
ʃqonqat͡sḭːkiːnt͡sḭːkḭn

͡tsiːk,͡tsiːk’iʃkuta

skunka,liːkunka

ʃkuta, ʃqutaࢎt‫ݕ‬eːqan,ࢎt‫ݕ‬eːqan,

Pa Totࢎt‫ݕ‬ḭːki,ࢎt‫ݕ‬ḛqan,

Si Totࢎt‫ݕ‬iːk,ࢎt‫ݕ‬iːk’i,ࢎt‫ݕ‬eːq(e),FM TotMi Totskunka̰, ʃʔonʔa̰,taːɬʔonʔa̰ʃkṵta̰, ɬkṵtanɬiːkḭ,
ɬeːʔḛː

UN TotAbbreviations for language names are the following: H Tep, Huehuetla Tepehua; Tl Tep, Tlachichilco Tepehua; PF Tep, Pisaflores Tepehua; FM Tot, Filomeno Mata Totonac; Si Tot, Sierra Totonac;
Pa Tot, Papantla Totonac; Mi Tot, Misantla Totonac; and UN Tot, Upper Necaxa Totonac. Parentheses around a final vowel indicate that we found this form both with and without the final vowel inthe data we examined.
1 In Misantla Totonac these terms have opposite meanings; haksa is a good, fragrant smell while hakʃa is a bad, stinky smell.
2 In Tlachichilco Tepehua, both sk’uk’uk and ʃk’uk’uk refer to the smell of lime (calcium oxide) or cement.

18

16

Odor of herb, women’s
makeup or perfume,badger, roach, javelina
meat
Smell of something burnt,
like hair, feathers, bone,fingernails, horn, beans,
meat

15

Description of General
Meaning of Odor Term
GroupsTABLE 8—continued

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

205

TABLE 9HUEHUETLA TEPEHUA ODOR TERMS WITHOUT KNOWN COGNATES
Description of General Meaning of Odor Term Groups

H Tep Ideophones

Delicious beautiful odor, floral (of varying degrees)
Delicious odor
A beautiful odor
A really bad odor
Similar to p’uks, but not as bad, something that has gone bad
A disagreeable, stinky odor (e.g., dead person, excrement)
No gloss; response to pineapple stimulant
No gloss; response to vinegar, soy sauce, rose stimulants
Odor of flavored waterʔuli, ʔulili, k’uli, k’ulik, sk’ulikan(i)k’us
ɬiːt͡simaːʃ
saw, t͡s’awࢎt‫ݕ‬aktࢎ ‫ݕ‬itaːࢎt‫’ݕ‬ajaːw2017). The odors an urban dweller is exposed to are different than those of a
farmer, and a Totonac speaker living in the highlands will experience a different smellscape than that of people residing on the coast. If odor terms are
fitted to their local ecology (Storch 2014; O’Meara and Majid 2016), thenthese differences could also shape smell lexicons and lead to greater variation in smell terminology. An alternative explanation lies not in differential
environments or cultures, but in shared biology. Language and olfaction appear to be poorly linked (Olofsson and Gottfried 2015), so variation in smell
terms could be the result of poor semantic coding resulting from this instableneural architecture—that is, we may see more variation in olfactory language
cross-linguistically because of unstable language-olfaction connections. These
different possibilities could be teased apart by more detailed examination of
the physical and cultural environments in which these linguistic communities
are embedded.
4. Conclusions. Olfaction has been categorized as not amenable tolinguistic expression, and as such, this domain has been given little attention in linguistic documentation and description. However, recent studies
have begun to shed light on elaborate olfactory lexicons in lesser-studied
languages. We describe—for the first time—the rich set of odor terms of
Huehuetla Tepehua. Using an odor elicitation task, as well as free-listing andinterview methodologies, we found 45 distinct terms which have a semantically specific odor meaning, and which are used to refer to diverse typesof odors. These range from pleasant and fragrant odors to edible and—its
converse—inedible odors to rancid, rotten, or excremental odors, among
others. The terms are not derived from lexical nouns referring to a particularodor source, nor to our knowledge are the terms specific to describing thesmell of one particular object. These findings show that olfaction is highlysʔoʔo̥

suːn,
ʃuːn
skah

salty

bitterɬakɬࢎt‫’ݕ‬ajaːw

ɬkak
haks

skah

sun

ɬkaka
haks

skah

suːn

sʔoʔo

saʔsi

ɬkak(a)haks(a),hakʃ(a),haqɬa,haqʃaʃuːni,
ʃṵːniʃkuta

siqs,
seqsi,
sḛqsisqoːq,sqoqo

PF Tep FM Totɬkakahaksa,
hakʃa,haqɬa,haqʃaʃkṵta,ʃqo̰taʃṵːnsqo̰qosa̰qsḭ

Si Totʃun,ʃṵːnʃkuta,
ʃkṵta,ʃqota
ɬka̰kahakʃa,
haksa

sqo̰qosa̰qsḭ

Pa Totskḛha2skṵtniʃqoq,
sqo̰q,ʃkṵkʃṵːnsiksi,saqsi

Mi Totskḭxa̰
ɬeːʔḛː
mṵksumo̰ːʔo̰ɬkaka̰

ʃkṵta̰ʃṵːnis’oʔo1sḛʔsḭ

UN Tot1 Where UNTot has an ejective fricative (Beck 2011), other Totonac-Tepehua languages have a consonant cluster comprised ofa fricative + a glottal or uvular stop.
2 Note that this form is cognate to the Tepehua-only odor term shown in table 8, row 12, ʃʔeh ‘Unpleasant smell, burning plastic,
hair, feathers, horns, bones, chile or cloth, tobacco, garbage, grass, crops; skunk’.

bittersweet
flavored watersavory, tasty
burnedpleasant taste
metallic, chemical

spicy
ɬkak
taste of guaxi,
hakʃ
citrus peels/zest

sour

saqsi

saʔsi̥

sweetsʔoʔoq,sʔoʔoTl Tep

H Tep

Gloss

TABLE 10TOTONAC-TEPEHUA TASTE COGNATES

206
international journal of american linguistics

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

207

lexically codable in Huehuetla Tepehua and, as such, prove problematicfor claims of olfaction being ineffable. The wider implication here is that
focused multi-method elicitation can directly address claims of “rara andrarisima” in language (Plank and Filimonova 2000), suggesting an urgent
need to widen the methodological toolbox for language documentation.
As more studies provide data questioning the ineffability of olfaction andthe culture-specific differences between olfactory lexicons across languages(Majid 2015), we are moving closer to what a typology of odor language mightlook like. The Huehuetla Tepehua data presented here add to our understanding of what such a typology must consider—namely, that in some languages
ideophones are loci for lexicalizing odor concepts. In the case of Huehuetla
Tepehua, ideophones can stand alone as adverbs in addition to functioning
as roots in derived verbs (see Kung 2007), indicating that in order to fully
understand the linguistic resources speakers have at their disposal to describe
smells, we must expand our lexical reach beyond verbs of perception. This
has implications not only for language documentation and description efforts,
but also for advancing our understanding of ideophones cross-linguistically.
Ideophones, in comparison with other word classes, are defined as being
performative in nature and depictive of sensory imagery, inviting listeners toimagine a particular experience or scene depicted in the form (Nuckolls 2010;
Dingemanse 2012). This might seem natural when it comes to sound or motion, but it is less obvious how olfactory ideophones can invite simulation of
olfaction—that is, it is difficult to imagine what a particular smell quality ought
to be solely based on the form of an ideophone (what specific, vivid smell
depiction is conjured to mind from ɬkuk, for example?). Our analysis of thesemantics of Huehuetla Tepehua odor terms, many of which are ideophones,
suggests they do not depict specific odor qualities (i.e., they do not havediagrammatic Gestalt iconicity). Their sound-symbolic nature can indicate
general qualities such as intensity and pleasantness (i.e., relative iconicity;
Dingemanse 2012:659), but even this requires lexeme-specific knowledge
since the same alternations can have different interpretations across roots.
Our analysis suggests that different sensory modalities allow different levelsof form-to-meaning mapping and different types of depiction (i.e., not depicting the quality of the percept in the case of olfaction). These findings enrich
our understanding of the role depiction can play in ideophone semantics—inparticular, its limitations in conveying odor percepts.
Finally, our comparative study across the closely related Totonac-Tepehua
languages found that olfactory cognates have considerable longevity. In theselanguages there is close overlap in smell and taste vocabulary, but intriguingly,
when examined by subdomain, olfactory terms appear to be more tenuousthan gustatory ones. This leaves open the question of whether this variationin the olfactory domain is attributable to differences in the languages, the208international journal of american linguistics

environment where they are spoken, or both. We speculate that the differences are more likely explained by the fact that humans are physically able todistinguish countless numbers of odors and that we are exposed to odors ona regular basis simply by the act of breathing, but the odors we are exposed
to regularly reflect differences in local ecology. This intriguing possibility
requires further investigation and paves new ground for thinking about therelationship between language, culture, and brain.
REFERENCES
AMEKA, FELIX K. 2001. Ideophones and the nature of the adjective word class in Ewe. Ideophones,ed. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 25–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
ARANA OSNAYA, EVANGELINA. 1953. Reconstrucción del proto-totonacano. Huastecos, totonacos ysus vecinos, ed. Ignacio Bernal and Eusebio Dávalos Hurtado, Revista Mexicana de Estudios
Antropológicos 13(2/3):123–30. México, DF: Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología.
ASCHMANN, HERMAN P. 1946. Totonac categories of smell. Tlalocan 2:187–89.
. 1983. Vocabulario Totonaco de la Sierra. Vocabularios Indígenas 7. México, DF: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.
. 2000. Diccionario Totonaco de la Sierra. Unpublished ms. http://www.sil.org/
resources/archives/51831.
BECK, DAVID. 2004. Upper Necaxa Totonac. Languages of the World/Materials 432. Munich:
Lincom.
. 2007. What to do with the ideophones? A problem in lexical classification from Upper Necaxa Totonac. Selected Lexical and Grammatical Issues in the Meaning–Text Theory:
In honour of Igor Mel’čuk [Studies in Language Companion Series 84], ed. Leo Wanner.
Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2008. Ideophones, adverbs, and predicate qualification in Upper Necaxa Totonac. IJAL
74(1):1–46.
. 2011. Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
BERLIN, BRENT, AND PAUL KAY. 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
BISHOP, RUTH G. 1984. Consonant play in lexical sets in Northern Totonac. Summer Institute of
Linguistics Mexico Workpapers 5:24–31.
BLENCH, ROGER. 2010. The sensory world: Ideophones in Africa and elsewhere. Perception of
the Invisible: Religion, Historical Semantics and the Role of Perceptive Verbs. Sprache undGeschichte in Afrika 21, ed. Anne Storch, 275–96. Cologne: Köppe.
BLENCH, ROGER, AND SELBUT LONGTAU. 1995. Tarok ophresiology. Issues in African Linguistics:
Essays in Honour of Kay Williamson, ed. E. N. Emenanjo and O. Ndimele, 340–44. Aba:
National Institute for Nigerian Languages.
BROWN, CECIL H., DAVID BECK, GRZEGORZ KONDRAK, JAMES K. WATTERS, AND SøREN WICHMANN.
2011. Totozoquean. IJAL 77(3):323–72.
BURENHULT, NICLAS, AND ASIFA MAJID. 2011. Olfaction in Aslian ideology and language. The
Senses and Society 6(1):19–29.
CAMPBELL, LYLE, TERRENCE KAUFMAN, AND THOMAS C. SMITH-STARK. 1986. Meso-America as a
linguistic area. IJAL 62(3):530–70.
CHAPMAN, ADAM. 1996. The syntax of Lao expressives. BA thesis, Australian National University,
Canberra.
CHILDS, G. TUCKER. 1994. African ideophones. Sound Symbolism, ed. Leanne Hinton, Johanna
Nichols, and John J. Ohala, 178–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

the challenge of olfactory ideophones

209

CLARK, HERBERT H. 2016. Depicting as a method of communication. Psychological Review
123(3):324–47.
DAVLETSHIN, ALBERT. n.d. Los sustantivos, adverbios y adjetivos ideofónicos en el tepehua dePisaflores, Veracruz, México. Unpublished ms.
DINGEMANSE, MARK. 2011. The meaning and use of ideophones in Siwu. PhD dissertation, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
. 2012. Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics
Compass 6(10):654–71.
DINGEMANSE, MARK, DAMIÁN BLASI, GARY LUPYAN, MORTEN H. CHRISTIANSEN, AND PADRAIC
MONAGHAN. 2015. Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive
Science 19(10):603–15.
DOKE, CLEMENT MARTYN. 1935. Bantu Linguistic Terminology. London: Longmans, Green.
ENGLAND, NORA. 2004. Entrando y saliendo de una posición: Palabras afectivas en Mam. Paper
presented at Lengua y Mantenimiento Cultural en Mesoamérica: Un Simposio, University ofTexas at Austin.
ENRÍQUEZ ANDRADE, HÉCTOR MANUEL. 2004. La categorización de olores en totonaco. Dimensión
Antropológica 11(30):103–28.
. 2010. El Campo Semántico de los Olores en Totonaco. Mexico, DF: Instituto Nacionalde Antropología e Historia.
HAYNIE, HANNAH, CLAIRE BOWERN, AND HANNAH LAPALOMBARA. 2014. Sound symbolism in thelanguages of Australia. PLoS ONE 9(4):e92852.
HENDERSON, ROBERT. 2016. A demonstration-based account of (pluractional) ideophones. Proceedings of SALT 26:664–83.
HENNING, HANS. 1916. Der Geruch. Leipzig, Germany: J. A. Barth. (Originally published in 1824)
HERZOG, DOROTHY. 1987. Ideophones in Huehuetla Tepehua. Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Unpublished ms.
HILL, JANE, AND OFELIA ZEPEDA. 1992. Derived words in Tohono O’odham. IJAL 58(4):355–404.
HOMBERT, JEAN MARIE. 1992. Terminologie des odeurs dans quelques langues du Gabon. Pholia
7:61–65.
HUMMEL, T., B. SEKINGER, S. R. WOLF, E. PAULI, AND G. KOBAL. 1997. “Sniffin’ sticks”: olfactory
performance assessed by the combined testing of odor identification, odor discrimination andolfactory threshold. Chemical Senses 22(1):39–52.
INALI. 2008. Catálogo de las lenguas indígenas nacionales: Variantes lingüísticas de México
con sus autodenominaciones y referencias geoestadísticas. Diario Oficial, January 14, 2008.
INEGI. 2005. II Conteo de Población y Vivienda, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
KAUFMAN, TERRENCE. 1988/2004. Sound symbolism seminar notes. Educational Materials Collection of Terrence Kaufman. The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, www.
ailla.utexas.org. Access: Public, PID ailla:137498. Accessed March 20, 2016.
KELLER, ANDREAS, RICHARD C. GERKIN, YUANFANG GUAN, ET AL. 2017. Predicting human olfactory
perception from chemical features of odor molecules. Science 355(6327):820-26.
KHAN, REHAN M., CHUNG-HAY LUK, ADEEN FLINKER, AMIT AGGARWAL, HADAS LAPID, RAFI HADDAD,
AND NOAM SOBEL. 2007. Predicting odor pleasantness from odorant structure: Pleasantness asa reflection of the physical world. Journal of Neuroscience 27:10015–23.
KLAMER, MARIAN. 2002. Semantically motivated lexical patterns: A study of Dutch and Kambera
expressives. Language 78(2):258–86.
KULEMEKA, A. T. 1995. Sound symbolic and grammatical frameworks: A typology of ideophones in Asian and African languages. South African Journal of African Languages
15(2):73–84.
KUNG, SUSAN SMYTHE. 2005. Sound symbolism and expressive language in Huehuetla Tepehua.
Paper presented at the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas Annual
Meeting, Oakland, CA, January 9, 2005. Archived in the Huehuetla Tepehua Collection of

210international journal of american linguistics

Susan Smythe Kung, The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, www.ailla.
utexas.org. Access: public. PID ailla:241552. Accessed May 5, 2015.
. 2006a. El lenguaje expresivo en el tepehua de Huehuetla: Entre simbolismo de sonido ypalabras afectivas. Paper presented at the VIII Congreso Nacional de la Asociación Mexicanade Lingüística Aplicada y la Universidad de las Américas—Puebla; Cholula, Puebla, México,
May 18, 2006. Archived in the Huehuetla Tepehua Collection of Susan Smythe Kung, The
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, www.ailla.utexas.org.Access: public.
PID ailla:139078. Accessed May 5, 2015.
. 2006b. Simbolismo de sonido y el lenguaje expresivo en el tepehua de Huehuetla.
Memorias del VIII Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste, ed. María del Carmen Morúa, vol. 3, 331–54. Hermosillo, Sonora, México: Editorial Universidad de Sonora.
. 2007. A descriptive grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua. PhD dissertation, University ofTexas at Austin. Archived in the Huehuetla Tepehua Collection of Susan Smythe Kung, The
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, www.ailla.utexas.org.Access: public.
PID ailla:134797. Accessed May 5, 2015.
KUNG, SUSAN, AND CAROLYN O’MEARA. 2014. Olfactory lexicon data collection 2014: Notebook1.
pdf. The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, www.ailla.utexas.org. Access: Public, PID ailla:256243. Accessed March 20, 2016.
LANHAM, L. W. 1960. The comparative phonology of Nguni. PhD dissertation, University of
Witwatersrand.
LEE, AMY PEI-JUNG. 2014. Lexical categories and conceptualization of olfaction in Amis. Language and Cognition 7(3):1–30.
. 2017. Ideophones, interjections, and sound symbolism in Seediq. Oceanic Linguistics
56(1):181–209.
LEVINSON, STEPHEN C., AND ASIFA MAJID. 2014. Differential ineffability and the senses. Mind andLanguage 29:407–27.
LEVY, PAULETTE. 1987. Fonología del totonaco de Papantla, Veracruz. Mexico, DF: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México.
. 2004. Adjectives in Papantla Totonac. Adjective Classes: A Cross-Linguistic Typology,
ed. R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, 147–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LEWIS, M. PAUL, GARY F. SIMONS, AND CHARLES D. FENNIG (eds.). 2016. Ethnologue: Languagesof the World, Nineteenth edition. Dallas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.
MACKAY, CAROLYN. 1999. A Grammar of Misantla Totonac. Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press.
MACKAY, CAROLYN J., AND FRANK R. TRECHSEL. 2015. Totonac-Tepehua genetic relationships.
Amerindia 37(2):121–57.
MAJID, ASIFA. 2015. Cultural factors shape olfactory language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
19(11):629–30.
MAJID, ASIFA (ed.). 2007. Field Manual, vol. 10. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
MAJID, ASIFA, AND NICLAS BURENHULT. 2014. Odors are expressible in language, as long as you
speak the right language. Cognition 130(2):266–70.
MAJID, ASIFA, AND NICOLE KRUSPE. 2018. Hunter-gatherer olfaction is special. Current Biology
28(3):409–13.
MAJID, ASIFA, LAURA SPEED, ILJA CROIJMANS, AND ARTIN ARSHAMIAN. 2017. What makes a bettersmeller? Perception 46(3–4):406–30.
MAJID, ASIFA, SEAN ROBERTS, LUDY CILISSEN, ET AL. 2018. Differential coding of perception in
the world’s languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(45):11369–76.
MCFARLAND, TERESA. 2010. Ideophones and templatic morphology in Totonac. Rara and Rarissima: Documenting the Fringes of Linguistic Diversity, ed. Jan Wohlgemuth and Michael
Cysouw, 235–46. Berlin: de Gruyter.

the challenge of olfactory ideophones211

MCQUOWN, NORMAN. 1990. [1940]. Gramática de la lengua totonaca (Coatepec, Sierra Norte dePuebla). Mexico, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
MITHUN, MARIANNE. 1982. The synchronic and diachronic behavior of plops, squeaks, croaks,
sighs, and moans. IJAL 48(1):49–58.
NICHOLS, JOHANNA. 1971. Diminutive consonant symbolism in western North America. Language
47:826–48.
NUCKOLLS, JANIS. 2010. Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue and Perspective. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
O’MEARA, CAROLYN, AND ASIFA MAJID. 2016. How changing lifestyles impact Seri smellscapesand smell language. Anthropological Linguistics 58(2):107–31.
OLOFSSON, JONAS K., AND JAY A. GOTTFRIED. 2015. The muted sense: Neurocognitive limitationsof olfactory language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19:314–21.
PERNISS, PAMELA, ROBIN L. THOMPSON, AND GABRIELLA VIGLIOCCO. 2010. Iconicity as a generalproperty of language: Evidence from spoken and signed languages. Frontiers in Psychology
1:227. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00227.
PLANK, FRANS, AND ELENA FILIMONOVA. 2000. The universals archive: A brief introduction forprospective users. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 53(1):109–23.
RATLIFF, MARTHA. 1992. Meaningful Tone: A Study of Tonal Morphology in Compounds, FormClasses, and Expressive Phrases in White Hmong. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
RIVLIN, ROBERT, AND KAREN GRAVELLE. 1984. Deciphering the Senses. New York: Simon andSchuster.
SAMARIN, WILLIAM J. 1967. Determining the meaning of ideophones. Journal of West African
Languages 4(2):35–41.
SANTIAGO FRANCISCO, JOSÉ. 2009. Colores y olores: un estudio lingüístico entre los totonacos deFilomeno Mata, Veracruz. BA thesis, Universidad Veracruzana, Veracruz.
SAPIR, EDWARD. 1911. Diminutive and augmentative consonant symbolism in Wishram. Handbook of American Indian Languages, Bureau of American Ethnography Bulletin 40, Part
1:638–46. Washington, DC.
SHEPHERD, GLENN M. 2006. Smell images and the flavour system in the human brain. Nature444(7117):316–21.
SMITH, BARRY C. 2012. Perspective: Complexities of flavour. Nature 486(7403):S6. doi.
org/10.1038/486S6a.
SMITH-STARK, THOMAS C. 1983. Estudios léxico-estadísticos de la familia totonaca. Unpublished
ms. Colegio de México. Archived in The Works of Thomas Cedric Smith Stark collection,
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, www.ailla.utexas.org. PID ailla:
243842. Accessed November 19, 2017.
SMOLL, LAETITIA. 2015. Ideophones in Katuena (Tunayana): A Cariban Language of the Amazon
Basin. Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic.
SMYTHE, SUSAN. 2000. Vocalic and uvular phonemes in Huehuetla Tepehua: The acoustic evidence.
Unpublished ms. University of Texas at Austin. Archived in the Huehuetla Tepehua Collectionof Susan Smythe Kung, The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, www.
ailla.utexas.org. Access: Public. PID ailla:134974. Accessed May 5, 2015.
. 2003. Reconstructing lost phonemes in Huehuetla Tepehua using “affectionate speech.”Texas Linguistic Forum 45. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Symposium about Language
and Society—Austin, April 12–14, 2002, ed. Inger Mey, Ginger Pizer, Hsi-Yao Su and Susan
Szmania, 167–76. University of Texas at Austin.
SPEED, LAURA, AND ASIFA MAJID. 2018. An exception to mental simulation: No evidence for embodied odor language. Cognitive Science 42(4):1146–78.
SPERBER, DAN. 1975. Rethinking Symbolism (A. L. Morton, trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1974).

212

international journal of american linguistics

STORCH, ANNE. 2004. Haptische, visuelle und olfaktorische Sprachen: Westnilotische Wahrnehmungen. Afrikanistik Online. https://www.afrikanistik-aegyptologie-online.de/archiv/2004/45.
Accessed September 3, 2018.
. 2013. Knowing, smelling and telling tales in Luwo. Perception and Cognition in Language and Culture, ed. A. Aikhenvald and A. Storch, 47–68. Leiden: Brill.
. 2014. A Grammar of Luwo: An Anthropological Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
STORCH, ANNE, AND RAINER VOSSEN. 2006. Odours and colours in Nilotic: Comparative case studies. Proceedings of the 8th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, ed. D. L. Payne and M. Reh,
223–40. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
SVANTESSON, JAN-OLOF. 2017. Sound symbolism: The role of word sound in meaning. Wiley
Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 8(5):e1441.
TUFVESSON, SYLVIA. 2007. Expressives. Field Manual, vol. 10, ed. A. Majid, 53–58. Nijmegen:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
. 2011. Analogy-making in the Semai sensory world. Senses and Society 6(1):86–95.
ULTAN, RUSSELL. 1978. Size-sound symbolism. Universals of Human Language, vol. 2: Phonology, ed. Joseph H. Greenberg, 525–67. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
VAN BEEK, WALTER E. A. 1992. The dirty smith: Smell as a social frontier among the Kapsiki/Higi
of north Cameroon and north-eastern Nigeria. Africa 62(1):38–58.
VOELTZ, ERHARD FRIEDRICH KARL, AND CHRISTA KILIAN-HATZ (eds.). 2001. Ideophones. TypologicalStudies in Language, vol. 44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
WATTERS, JAMES K. 1988. Topics in Tepehua grammar. PhD thesis, University of California,
Berkeley.
WESTERMANN, DIEDRICH HERMANN. 1927. Laut, Ton und Sinn in Westafrikanischen Sudansprachen.
Festschrift Meinhof, 315–28. Hamburg: L. Friederichsen.
. 1937. Laut und Sinn in einigen Westafrikanischen Sprachen. Archiv für Vergleichende
Phonetik 1:154–72, 193–211.
WILKINS, DAVID P. 1981. Towards a theory of semantic change. Honors thesis, Australian National
University, Canberra.
WILLIAMS GARCÍA, ROBERTO. 1963. Los Tepehuas. Xalapa, Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana.
. 1972. Mitos Tepehuas. México, DF: Secretaría de Educación Pública.
WNUK, EWELINA, AND ASIFA MAJID. 2014. Revisiting the limits of language: The odor lexicon of
Maniq. Cognition 131(1):125–38.
YESHURUN, YAARA, AND NOAM SOBEL. 2010. An odor is not worth a thousand words: From multidimensional odors to unidimensional odor objects. Annual Review of Psychology 61:219–41.