I love this kind of stuff.
Animals make much the same sounds around the world, but each language expresses them differently. English and French cows sound the same, but not in English and French! Explore the sounds of the world’s languages through the sounds of the world’s animals.
Example:
- Afrikaans: moe-moe
- Albanian: mu
- Arabic (Algeria): mooooooo
- Bengali: hamba
- Catalan: muuuu
- Chinese (Mandarin): mu mu
- Croatian: muuuu
- Danish: muh
- Dutch: boeh
- English: moo
- English (Old English): Oxa hlewð.
- Esperanto: muu
- Estonian: muu
- Finnish: ammuu
- French: meuh
- German: mmuuh
- Greek: moo
- Hebrew: moo
- Hindi: mo:-mo:
This information comes from the website of:
Catherine N. Ball
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
Georgetown University
Washington DC 20057
ballc@georgetown.edu
http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/
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In Russia people say “aptchee” when they sneeze. My husband would always laugh when I said “achoo” as I sneezed. It really was a discernible word I was making.
In Russia people say “aptchee” when they sneeze. My husband would always laugh when I said “achoo” as I sneezed. It really was a discernible word I was making.
Kwang Kwang? Who knew.
Back in prehistoric times, when I was a student in France, some French and foreign students were having fun comparing what sounds different languages use for animals. My favorite was ducks. English-speakers say “quack quack,” Spanish-speakers say “cua cua” (kwah kwah), and French-speakers say “quin quin,” which is almost impossible to transliterate (roughly, kwang kwang) because English has no nasals. The French win, hands down, on the duck sounds, because duck calls sound nasal. 🙂
Raggedy,
I think that linguistics is pretty interesting.
WBM,
That was interesting. Thank you.
In Israel dogs say “hav, hav” instead of “bow-wow” or “ruff-ruff”. This is one of the things that you need to learn after you make aliyah (and if you have little kids). Guns make the sound “pew-pew”, which I always laughed at when my kids played (associating it with p.u., of course).
This makes me proud to have been a linguistics major in college – sort of!