He thinks of the words he compiles as “what would be written in the text balloon coming from the mouth of an animal” in a comic book.įour years ago, Ke Nguyen, a video editor in London, took a different tack by consulting friends and volunteers recruited through Gumtree, a Craigslist-like site in the U.K. But for fun, in the course of his travels, he has amassed a giant spreadsheet of animal sounds in different languages (from which the examples above are drawn). Language is too changeable to allow us that pleasure, standing as we are at the end of a possibly 150,000-year timeline since human speech began.”īy day, Abbott is a professor of biomedical engineering. As John McWhorter recently wrote at The Atlantic, “No theory will ever account for why the words in a sentence like ‘He couldn’t even get halfway over that wall!’ are the way they are. Some have hypothesized over the years that language originated with the imitation of natural sounds-a notion sometimes referred to as the “ bow-wow theory.” But whatever the answer to this question, onomatopoeia explains only a sliver of the words we use. “Academics like me are still at the rudimentary ‘stamp collecting’ phase where I am making a collection of sounds.” “No rigorous studies have been done” on comparing onomatopoeia across cultures, Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide in Australia told me by email. Hot Streaks in Your Career Don’t Happen by Accident Derek Thompson It has something to do with the alchemy of humans in different times and places striving to mimic noises in the world around them, and to incorporate this mimicry into distinct linguistic systems and cultural contexts. Other times it’s a free-for all witness the grunting pig, which goes k nor knor, oink, groin groin, and hrgu-hrgu as he trots around the world.Īnd the thing about it is, we don’t really understand why this fluctuation occurs. Sometimes there’s remarkable consistency across these words (most cows go something like moo) and sometimes there are curious outliers (America’s exceptional gobble gobble for a turkey). Instead, they speak to a larger phenomenon: Words formed from a sound and intended to imitate that sound-what linguists refer to as onomatopoeia-fluctuate around the world even when the underlying sound is roughly the same in each place. But variations in dog breeds can’t fully account for these differences (for what it’s worth, you can find Swedish Vallhunds in Oklahoma). Granted, a Swedish Vallhund is not an Anatolian Shepherd or a Japanese Spitz. Americans might say a small dog goes arf arf and a medium-sized dog ruff ruff. Imagine a somewhat larger dog, and the words change yet again: to vov-vov, hauv hauv, and wan wan, respectively. In Swedish, the sound of a small dog barking is rendered as bjäbb-bjäbb in Turkish, hev hev in Japanese, kian kian. He exists the world over, in various forms and sizes, but his signature sound doesn’t translate all that well.
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