Re: onomatopoetic animal sounds

Oskar Gudlaugsson skrev:

> Anyway, to Daniel (and Niklas, if he's reading), I liked the
> essay. So I want to help you with some minor nitpicking :) Here
> goes:
>
> Cat, Icelandic     mjá  mjálma
>
> Just want to make clear to the others that Icelandic {á} is
> pronounced [au].
Yes, I've thought about adding an [au] to make sure people
pronounce it correctly. On a side note, my Old Icelandic teacher
(Swedish) has the habit of pronouncing Old Icelandic as present
day Icelandic, e.g. <á> as [au]. I don't know why really.

> Duck, Icelandic    bra bra      ?kvaka
>
> You can take the question mark off that; "kvaka" would be the
> verb, though we're not actually fond of that usage. We'd say
> "Öndin segir bra-bra-bra." ("The duck says quack-quack").
Ah, okay. My consultant Pétur (a phonetician at my department)
was a bit unsure about that one.

> Dog, Norwegian   vov, voff bjeffe, gjøre
> Dog, Danish   vov           gøre
>
> I think the verb form there is wrong; the Danish inf form is "gø",
> and the Norwegian would be "gjø". The Old Norse word is "geyja",
> which is technically also an Icelandic word. The confusion there
> is because the verb "gø" (taking Danish as an example) has the
> same present indicative form as the verb "gøre", which means "do";
> they share the form "gør".
OK. Some of our consultants gave the present tense form and
we wanted it all to be in the infinitive. Now, unfortunately
I'm not that good at Norwegian and Danish. (You'd think I
would be, wouldn't you. :-P) Anyway. Thanks for clearing that up.

> Pig, Icelandic   ?rýt       rýta
>
> Nah, "rýt" is nothing; that's not the sound. We simply don't have
> any sound word for that.
That was a bit of a construction of Pétur's. I'll remove that
completely then.

> Icelandic pip     pipa
>
> Add an accent: "píp, pípa".
OK.

> Finally:
>
> "2.9 Rooster
>
> The sound of the rooster can be described with the following formula:
> kVkVLVkV, where k is /k/ (or, in the case of Icelandic, /g/), V is a vowel
> and L is a liquid (i.e. either /l/ or /r/). The only exceptions to this
> formula are Finnish and Maltese. After having looked at other languages
> outside of Europe, we might mention that this formula also holds for
> Hebrew, Hindi and Indonesian."
>
> Just wanted to add that Icelandic /g/ is unvoiced when syllable-initial,
> [k], so Icelandic sounds pretty much like the other langs in this regard;
> don't let the orthography confuse you! :)
Aha. Interesting. (I knew about the <á> = [au] but not this one. Hmm...)
North Saami is kinda the same. They spell unaspirated [k] as <g>.
Cf. _giella_ ['kiel:a].

> Anyway, applause for nice work :)
Thanks! Thanks to you too for your "minor nitpicking". :)

I'll forward that applause to Niklas as well. :)

||| daniel

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