Semantics of Taste: A Joint Venture of Linguistics and Sensory Science

Talking about taste is part of our daily life. It takes place in different forms depending on the prior knowledge of the speaker: e.g. sensory science, a subdiscipline of food science, and in everyday life. Surprisingly, sensory scientists being especially trained for their tasks and consumers use similar strategies to verbalize taste perceptions: They either name the perception by a suitable lexeme or they describe the perception with the help of different strategies (e.g. giving references, describing processes). In this talk we would like to focus on two topics: The different means to describe taste perceptions with regard to the different disciplines: sensory sciences and everyday life. Critical issues in translation of sensory descriptors especially in lay language. The semantics of single words is often not congruent with singles words in another language. A nice example is scharfin German. This word could be hot or spicyor hot and spicy in English which reversely could be scharf or würzig. Culture and the food we eat are strongly connected and thus, language is as well with the terms and references used to talk about food. In order to create a database for different languages, basic taste term tests were performed with lay people in different countries (Italy, France, Spain). Furthermore, taste terms, in particular adjectives, were extracted from standard dictionaries. Our results confirm the many faces of taste perception with taste not limited to basic taste in its meaning. This will be illustrated with various language examples. Furthermore, the number of terms differs from one language to the next, indicating that the cross-language barrier might be an essential one which needs attention in a globalized world.