{"id":489,"date":"2013-08-13T02:54:34","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T16:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/?p=489"},"modified":"2014-02-20T07:01:58","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T20:01:58","slug":"whats-the-french-for-woof","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/whats-the-french-for-woof\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the French for Woof?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rise and shine! The birds are tweeting<\/i>, the ducks are quacking<\/i>, the cows are mooing<\/i> and the dogs are\u2026gav gav<\/i>…hold on, I get ahead of myself sometimes. I should start with a brief introduction to onomatopoeia.<\/p>\n

This \u2018onomatopoeia\u2019 is what refers to words that represent sounds. These sounds don\u2019t have to be animal noises as I demonstrated, but can be the sounds of anything that happens to, well, make a sound.<\/p>\n

The air around you can \u2018flutter,\u2019 \u2018swish,\u2019 \u2018swoosh,\u2019 or \u2018whip\u2019; too much wind and you might fall and \u2018bang\u2019 your head; let out a \u2018screech\u2019 and \u2018thump\u2019 your hand to the ground, while everyone else \u2018claps\u2019 at your unfortunate accident. It\u2019s okay though: get up, grab a drink and \u2018gurgle\u2019 it down, let out a \u2018belch\u2019 and all\u2019s well, you can go back and \u2018chatter\u2019 with your pals.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cWait\u201d you say, \u201cwhen will he tell me what on earth \u2018gav gav\u2019 is?\u201d Right, I\u2019m on it!<\/i> <\/ins>\u2018Gav gav\u2019 is the sound a dog makes in Russian. \u201cThat’s crazy! Dogs bark, make a \u2018ruff <\/ins>ruff\u2019 or \u2018woof\u2019 sound,\u201d I hear you cry. You are correct — in English they <\/ins>make those sounds, but in Russia dogs speak another language. Danish dogs say \u2018vov-vov,\u2019 while Dutch dogs \u2018waf waf,\u2019 Finnish \u2018hau hau,\u2019 French \u2018ouah <\/ins>ouah,\u2019 Japanese \u2018wan wan,\u2019 and Turkish \u2018hauv hauv.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAmazing\u201d you say, \u201care there multilingual dogs too?\u201d No, that\u2019s absurd. <\/ins>What is happening here is that people of different languages have different ways <\/ins>of describing the sounds they hear; in English we hear babies crying as \u2018wahwah\u2019.<\/p>\n

It seems logical to write the word as we hear it, and most other languages follow that principle. In German there is \u2018w\u00e4h w\u00e4h,\u2019 in Mandarin \u2018w\u0101 w\u0101,\u2019 and in Bulgarian \u2018yaaaaa yaaaaa,\u2019 for example. In some languages however the spelling can appear less obvious to an English speaker: in French it is \u2018ouin ouin,\u2019 Finnish \u2018by\u00e4\u00e4h,\u2019 while in Catalan it\u2019s \u2018angu\u00e9\u00e9\u2019.<\/p>\n

The \u2018ticking\u2019 of time in English is most often \u2018tick tock,\u2019 whereas in Japanese it is \u2018katchin katchin,\u2019 which to us might sound more like \u2018ka-ching ka-ching\u2019 as we spend our hard earned cash. Let\u2019s say I \u2018crash\u2019 into the car of a Frenchman, he might \u2018tut-tut\u2019 his horn, as the heart of my Dutch friend in the backseat races \u2018boenk boenk.\u2019 An Italian cop then pulls over with his siren singing \u2018nino nino\u2019 and I get out to explain myself when a Spanish dog bites me: \u2018chac!\u2019<\/p>\n

No, it doesn\u2019t sound like a good day, but there is a lesson to be learnt; despite being one of the more overlooked aspects of language learning, these onomatopoeias are still important, and are of indispensable help when trying to explain to a Japanese doctor how a dog \u2018gari gari\u2019 your hand.<\/p>\n

Can you think of any other onomatopoeias that make you \u2018ha ha\u2019 or \u2018hmmm\u2019?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rise and shine! The birds are tweeting, the ducks are quacking, the cows are mooing and the…","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-russian"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1324,"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions\/1324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.languagetrainers.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}