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

>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

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