1074: Onomatopoeic Variation Nov 17, 2017

Onomatopoeias—words that mimic non-human sounds like 'shriek'—should all logically sound more or less the same, since people are ostensibly all hearing the same noises, but this is not exactly the case. Sometimes the variation is reasonable, such as how cats for English speakers say 'meow' whereas in Malay the word is 'ngjau', which is not the same, but both start with a nasal sound and end in a similar vowel-sound, while other times it may be rather different, as with the Bengali 'hamba' for the noise a cow makes, or the Russian 'gav gav' for dogs. If you know of any others, do include them in the comments. The only sort of explanation, besides any variation caused by different breeds (which would not account for differences in onomatopoeias of inanimate things, like the German version of Rice Krispies' "snap, crackle, and pop" being "Knisper! Knasper! Knusper") is that crucially cows do not say 'hamba', but neither do they say 'moo'; all of these are at best an approximation that people probably don't think much about after early childhood when learning the sounds from adults in the first place.