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What are some words that make you mad?

You know those onomatopoeia words (words whose sound imitates the sound they represent)e.g splash or plop, well what are these words in other languages, are they similar words that sound like the sound? Does that make sense?

  • Answer:

    Other languages also have it, but the words aren't the same. Ukrainian dogs don't "arf," they "hahv." A Ukrainian duck doesn't quack, it says "kva-kva" and is therefore called a "kvachka." Their word for splash sounds a little like splash, and so forth. The same thing is true in German--a sound evocative of the sound it makes, but not like English. The sound a rooster makes is expressed in various ways in different languages. So is the word for "achoo." What makes is more difficult is that after a language becomes civilized and adopts an alphabet, that language seems to start losing sounds. If you look at a quite old English dictionary, you may find that they recognize more different vowels sounds than you make today.

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This is an interesting topic. I've never thought about this, even though I've lived in Japan, Europe and now in America. In Japan, dogs go: wan-wan and cats go: nya-nya.

Cheery Cherry

I'm trying to run a research on this topic. I'd like to know wether this difference is just because of the way we transcribe our sounds in the different languages or because our perception od sounds is different. Anybody any idea? I'm from CHile and our dogs go wau!

Anonymous

The 'knock' sound in German is rendered as 'klopf' - which is similar, but obviously not the same. There's a LONG list of these on good old Wikipedia - though it won't tell you why they're different. I would guess (total guess!) that's it's more to do with the way we transcribe sounds in our different language's (and also how we don't even have the exact same sounds in different languages - I'm thinking of, say, Russian, compared to English) that causes it, rather than the perception of sound. They're approximations of a sound that work best in the language they're transcribed in.

Anonymous

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