Re: onomatopoetic animal sounds

On Fri, 13 Apr 2001 09:31:58 -0400, Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
wrote:

>OED says the verb 'gale' (which once was an English word, related to but
not the direct ancestor of modern 'yell') meant (1) to sing or "deliver an
>oracular response", and (2) meant, of a dog, to bark, and of a bird
>(especially the cuckoo) "to utter its peculiar note".
Think "nightinGALE".

----

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].

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").

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".

Pig, Icelandic   ?rýt       rýta

Nah, "rýt" is nothing; that's not the sound. We simply don't have any sound
word for that.

Icelandic pip     pipa

Add an accent: "píp, pípa".

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! :)

Anyway, applause for nice work :)

Regards,
Óskar

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