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.
This doesn’t make much sense because it purely looks at spelling, and not at pronunciation. We use ‘woef’ in Dutch as well, which is pronounced like, and probably has a common origin with, German ‘wuff’ and English ‘woof’.
French ‘ouaf’ is also pronounced essentially the same as Dutch ‘waf’, likely also not by accident.
This map is pretty much meaningless.
Spanish “guau” sounds like English “wow”
(Depending on accent, obv)
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
French is “ouah ouah”.
German can be “wuff wuff” or “wau wau”.
I doubt the rest is correct
Finnish is “hau hau”
Is must have been really hard to make that chart. Imagine listening to lots of dogs from different places
How, how?
Turns out they bark the same.
The one for the Netherlands is wrong: dogs say “blaf blaf” here, not “waf waf.”
Probably also depends on where in the Netherlands you are. Rarely hear anyone say “Blaf!” I thought “Woef!” would be the most common.
Well, they say the city I live in has the most neutral of all Dutch accents… therefore, so do our dogs!
And just like that I remembered about the Arbitrary Nature of Linguistic Sign I read about 20 years ago.
