And just like that I remembered about the Arbitrary Nature of Linguistic Sign I read about 20 years ago.
The one for the Netherlands is wrong: dogs say “blaf blaf” here, not “waf waf.”
French is “ouah ouah”.
German can be “wuff wuff” or “wau wau”.
I doubt the rest is correct
Turns out they bark the same.
I wonder how many semanticists and biologists working together it took, to reach this conclusion.
Fun! Source article also covers meows.
How did they get it so wrong? “Mjan” doesn’t even exist in Swedish, it should be mjau.
Interesting how the cat sound is almost the same in most languages, but the dog sound varies a lot
Thank you!
Well the Korean dogs seem to be meowing as is
Good find! Thanks
General pattern seems to be:
- labial and/or velar continuant (approximant or fricative) or [h]
- open and/or rounded vowel
- labial and/or velar continuant or a close back rounded vowel
Exceptions are relatively easy to explain:
- What’s being transliterated as Farsi “gh” is likely “غ”. It’s [ɢ]~[ɣ]. It is not an actual exception.
- Russian used to have a [ɣ] sound, but it got merged into /g/. (Note this explains why some older loanwords with /h/ get neared to /g/, [h] and [ɣ] sound somewhat similar.)
- Spanish gu- is [gʷ], a sound Romance languages often use as replacement for [w], after Latin [w] became [v]. Spanish did redevelop the sound but odds are the onomatopoeia is older.
How is voff so much different than woof? It’s pronounced like exactly the same.
Yeah, same for German “wuff”. The pronunciation is slightly softer in “woof”, but there’s no letters you could use to make it sound more similar.
woef and miauw in Dutch
Is must have been really hard to make that chart. Imagine listening to lots of dogs from different places
How, how?
