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OT: Animal-sound ideophones (was Re: OT: Junk)

From:Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
Date:Saturday, September 13, 2003, 15:21
>Not quite as dire as my experience with mis-hearing Sino-English. While >having dim-sum in Detroit (I know, an unlikely idea), we asked the waitress >what was in one of the dumplings, and all 3 of us distinctly heard "cat >meat", which she finally clarified to [kw&p?mi?], which {crab}indeed it >turned out to be. Delicious too.
Now this one reminds me of an experience that I had when I had been in Demark for only about a month. Fortunately this did not occur at the table. We were standing around talking in the yard (in English because my Danish wasn't very good yet), and my host-father said that something that was really good to eat was "dog." Now I knew that I had to have misheard this because I was in Denmark, not in the Philippines, and because he did speak English with a moderately heavy accent. I tried to get a clarification as to which animal he meant, but all I kept hearing was "dog." Finally, he said, "You know, dog. It says 'rap rap.'" Unfortunately, this was not especially helpful because I hadn't the slightest idea until that moment that animals say different things in different languages. Eventually I somehow managed to figure out (maybe one of my host-siblings who had less of an accent pronounced the word) that the animal in question was a "duck." It has occurred to me to wonder how many of you have invented any animal-sound ideophones for your conlangs? If you have, how did you come up with them? Isidora

Replies

Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>