Robert from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was surprised to find when working in Siberia that children there are taught to use different words to say the sound an animal makes. For example, English speakers say cock-a-doodle-doo, but children in Siberia are taught the sound is more like koh-kock-a-ree. In fact, renderings of animal sounds vary from language to language. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Different Animal Sounds in Different Languages”
Hi there. You have A Way with Words.
Yes, this is Robert Pill from Oklahoma City.
Hi, Robert. What’s going on?
Well, I had a question about something I ran into when I was traveling and working in the woodfield years ago over in Siberia, Russia.
And I had brought over some CNC toys for some of the kids over there that worked for the company.
And when they played them, they were all shocked because all the animal noises were incorrect.
Like the rooster says, cock-a-doodle-doo.
And they would say, no, the rooster says koukakaree.
And every animal on the CNC, from the farmer’s CNC toy, was different than what they said the animal noises were.
So you were in Russia doing what?
I was working as a mud engineer in the oil industry.
We used polymers that are in ice cream and chewing gum to make the mud thick, clean the hole.
And we were trying to show them that they don’t have to just kill everything to drill a hole in the ground.
Gotcha.
I put D-Zone things in there.
But I was wondering, when they translate like a children’s story from Russian to English,
Do they translate it with the cock-a-doodle-doo, or do they translate it with the co-cock-a-ree?
It depends on the translator, really.
It depends on how much they want to keep the original flavor of the source material.
And I was also wondering, is it like that with every country, like Japan?
It’s on a language-by-language basis, yes.
Absolutely, yeah.
It depends largely on the phonetic inventory of the native language, right, Martha?
Absolutely, yeah.
And you can go online and find some fun illustrations of what animals say in different languages.
Some great YouTube videos, by the way, if you want to hear them spoken.
There you go.
There you go.
Yeah, so there’s lots to explore there.
I remember being shocked when I was much younger and met a Brazilian kid who said,
No, no, birds go pew, pew.
The laser guns.
Yeah, right.
But yeah, so that’s one of the cultural surprises you have when you encounter kids’ books, when you’re starting another language and you think all of this stuff that seems so basic to you, like, oh, I’ll start with the kids’ stuff.
That’s going to be easy.
And you’re like, oh, it isn’t.
It’s even the basic stuff that I thought I knew.
And even the other thing, when you start with the sounds of the language, you think, oh, A is for Apple.
Well, they’re not going to use Apple for the A sound.
They’re going to use something else.
And Z isn’t going to have a zebra.
It’s going to be something else if they even have that sound.
And so it starts really on in learning a new language.
Your mind gets blown again and again and again.
Yeah.
So thanks for calling and sharing your story with us.
All right.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Take care.
Thank you for calling.
