| You remember that toy that, when you pulled the string, had a big arrow that would cycle around and finally settle on some farm animal, at which point a mildly emasculated voice would tell you, "The pig goes oink-oink"? Did you ever wonder what would happen if you took that toy to Poland, or if the kids in South Korea would agree? Did you ever consider approaching your linguistics department with a master’s thesis solely dedicated to onomatopoeia?
No? Well, apparently you got more sleep than I did during university, but the Legacy of the See and Say lives on at flat33.com/bzzzpeek/html/bzzzpeek.html.
The mission is simple: find native speakers from around the globe (ideally children between the ages of two and seven) and ask them what a train, owl, horse, frog or cuckoo clock sounds like. The site has almost 30 entries from countries like Spain, Russia, Greece and the Arab League squeaking and cooing the sounds of their favourite creatures. New submissions are welcome and the site is a great learning tool for kids, with icons taking the respective colours of the country’s flag.
A rat from the Arab League sounds like a train, and the Hungarian frog seems to have a machine-gun tendency. The similarities are just as interesting as the differences, as in the case of the Japanese crow, which sounds more like the Canadian crow than the British one.
Which, of course, leads you to wonder: are we hearing them differently or is there something lost in the translation? |
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