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Cats "meow" (miˈaʊ̯) in all languages. Dogs can woof, blaf, ham, ao, ...
by rvieira 3y ago
Cats "meow" (miˈaʊ̯) in all languages. Dogs can woof, blaf, ham, ao, ...
- airza 3y agoJapanese uses “nyaa” for meow. I’m sure there are other counterexamples.
- lampington 3y agoThanks! TIL that nyancat is something like "meowcat"
- kortex 3y agoI would actually contend that "meow" and "nya" are pseudo-cognates, they are onomatopoeia of the same sound. M and N are both nasals, and iˈaʊ̯ and ia are close in vowel space.
- resonious 3y agoCan also add that dogs say "wan", which I found surprising. Seems even the onomatopoeia can differ quite a bit!
- Petrosz007 3y agoIn hungarian when “[the cat is] meowing” we say “[a macska] nyávog”, which means to make sounds similar to ‘nyí’ [1]. Now that I think about it, it’s weird, because the we use “miáú” for the actual sound, but we don’t use the verb “miákol”, which apparently exists. [1]: https://uesz.nytud.hu/index.html?uuid=a95e306a-7590-1014-8655-f6dd518faf98 https://uesz.nytud.hu/index.html?uuid=a95e306a-7590-1014-865...
- LorenPechtel 3y agoOne would think animal sounds would be basically universal but it isn't so--other than meow I can't recall any animal sound that was understandable to my wife (native Mandarin speaker.)
- downvotetruth 3y agoImitative hiss noise? owl who?
- LorenPechtel 3y agoI'm talking about the word for the sound, not imitations of the animal's actual sound. I have been understood imitating an animal.
- simlevesque 3y agoThe rooster sound is pretty different from one language to the other.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mcswell 3y agoThis isn't the same thing, but: in most indigenous languages of Latin America where Spanish is the national language, the word for cat is something like 'mees' (or 'mis' if you use the Spanish-like spelling). This is because cats were introduced in that area by the Spaniards, and a common way to call a cat in Spanish is 'mis-mis' (like saying "here kitty kitty" in English). One exception to that is Waorani (an indigenous language of Ecuador), where the word for cat is kitty (not their spelling). I'll let you guess why.
- irrational 3y agoBut, meow isn’t the word for cat, it’s the word for the sound a cat makes.
- sparrish 3y agoIt's called onomatopoeia and they're surprisingly different in many languages.