single word requests - "Taste" is to "flavor" as "touch" and "sight" are to what?


For the senses, we have:



  • flavor for taste

  • aroma/odor/scent for smell

  • sound for hearing

  • ____? for touch/feel

  • ____? for sight/see


So one tastes a flavor, smells an aroma, hears a sound, feels a(n) _____, and sees a(n) _____. For the former, part of me wants to say texture, but I feel that is too specific; for the latter, I want to use visual or sight, but but does that make sense, seeing a visual or a sight?



Answer



The sense verbs are an interesting paradigm. English has three types of sense verb (with a lot of overlap), and a number of derived nouns. Two of the verb classes differ in whether they're volitional, and the other one is an experiential sense with special "Flip" syntax.


One type of verb is the Non-Volitional: hear, see, smell, taste, touch/feel
Another is the Volitional: listen, look, smell, taste, touch/feel


Hearing: You listen to something on purpose, but you can hear it by accident.
Vision: You look at something on purpose, but you can see it by accident.
Verbs for the other three senses don't vary; you can smell, taste, or touch/feel on purpose or not.


The third type is the Flip verbs: sound, look, smell, taste, feel.
Again the three chemical/kinesthetic senses don't change, though only feel works as a Flip verb:



That looks tasty. That sounds flat. That smells sour. That tastes delicious. That feels weird.



The subject of a Flip verb is not the experiencer, but rather whatever is causing the sensation being experienced. The experiencer is normally not mentioned, but if it is, it occurs in a preposition phrase (most likely to me).


Interestingly, only hearing — the sense used by language — gets to have 3 distinct sense verbs: hear, listen, and sound.


As far as nouns go, one can speak of a look and a sight (respectively from look and see), as well as a glimpse, a vision, an appearance, a sighting, an image — and no doubt many more — for vision alone. This is what a thesaurus is for.


Touch is underrepresented in nouns; adjectives are more likely. But one does speak of something having a feel, occasionally a feeling — a word which can be generalized to cover any metaphoric, psychological, or spiritual sensation, whether experienced or not, as in



I had a feeling he was going to betray us.



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