Sweet?

There is a cliché that says Eskimos have a vast number of words for snow, the exact figure used varies greatly with some people putting it at over 1,000 and others putting it in the high hundreds.  Truth be told the real figure isn't one you can pin down as there is no definitive "Eskimo" dictionary - even if there was it would only include words as part of the formal language and omit words used in slang.  Inspired by this cliché however, and in an attempt to refute it, there have been several academic studies that have sought to analyse how many words can be considered part of Eskimo culture and can be considered as relating to snow.

The idea that language requires such vast collections of words to describe things that seem rather simple to us is something that at first seems almost inconsiderate.  As if it implies language is incompetent when it comes to descriptive terms.  On the other hand you could argue that it is not the language itself that is limited but rather the person employing it.  That perhaps the creation of new words that mean the same thing is not born out of a need to have an accurate word but rather the speaker's limited lexicon, that it is their restricted vocabulary that prevents the articulation of existing ideas.

To give an example of this we can take a fairly basic idea, a simple word we often use which is common parlance - "sweet" - and analyse the concept it represents.  Most people know what you mean when you say a food is sweet but do we actually agree on what constitutes sweetness?  Would you and I both consider the same foods as sweet?  Would you consider an Orange to be a sweet tasting fruit?  Personally I would not, but I know many people who would.  Likewise I know many would consider Honey to be sweet, yet again I would not consider it sweet.  Both of these things I do not consider bitter which is the antonym but rather I would simply consider them as something more "middle-ground" that is not sweet enough to be considered sweet to me.

This throws open analysis of all five senses.  Sight, Hearing, Taste, Touch, and Smell.  These five senses are the fundamental percepts we use to experience the world yet for each and every one there will be wide ranging disagreement as to what constitutes what.  It is often the middle that is the easiest to define.  We speak of colours as being within the seven colour spectrum of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet, all of which we can identify the most prominent of each but the spectrum itself is not clearly divided and the discussions and debates emerge when you begin to look at those gradient colours in between and you find arguments over what is considered to be what.  The easiest example to give is to ask where "orange" starts and ends on the colour spectrum.  You will begin to see people have very different opinions on what they would consider each colour range to be.

What I find fascinating about all of this is quite simply the fact that while we have collective terms that everyone uses and thinks very little of their definitions, we base our interactions and communications with others on the assumption they have the same definition as us.  This can be cumbersome or complementary depending on how integral the distinction is; so that beggars the question, even though someone may say the same thing as you, do they actually agree with your internal conceptualisation of that belief?