WE are an Ethnically Diverse mob, here !!!!!! :)

[GlennSprigg]

Although this Forum is in English, it amazes & impresses me with the level of well spoken
English from the numerous countries that contribute here !!     

That being said, different countries have many very different words, for things we take for granted.
'Onomatopœia'... is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests
the sound that it describes. Here is a small collection of such cross-language idiosyncrasies.    ..........
[EDIT]  Left out the dogs. Now included xox

Ok, the 'word' describing a Cats sound is relatively common......

However, there are a few variances......


After that, it all goes out the window !!   ......








That will do... Sorry this wasn't Electrical/Electronics related, but hopefully still interesting   

[Bud]

Are you confusing Ethical with Ethnical ?

[GlennSprigg]

Are you confusing Ethical with Ethnical ?

OOPS !!!  Yes I did. Now corrected the typo 

[Smokey]

poor Albanian pig farmer better watch his back!

[Fraser]

Love this post. Made me laugh. Thank you

[Ampera]

I find it interesting how we, collectively, around the world and from completely unique linguistic backgrounds decided to make written transcriptions for the sounds that other animals make. It serves little purpose that I can find, yet it's still done, and there are regional agreements upon which ones are correct.

[0xdeadbeef]

Hm, that's cute and all but since two of three German examples are misspelled ("quak" and "summ") and some languages seems to be mixed ("kikeriki" is actually German while the Spanish word should be "quiquiriquí"), I wonder how much of the other examples are actually correct.

[RoGeorge]

 

[SparkyFX]

It serves little purpose that I can find

Because children books are full of them and using the phonetic alphabet is a bit over the top.

[Nominal Animal]

That dog älähts, to which kalig calahts!

It is a broken translation of a Finnish proverb, "se koira älähtää, johon kalikka kalahtaa", with no less than three onomatopoeic words: älähtää (yelp out), kalikka (a small stick), kalahtaa (to clank on something; think of a small stick or board hitting a rock).

The proverb just means that if you get a response, that response is from whatever you managed to hit.  As you can imagine, it's hideously difficult to translate properly to English, which is kind of why that "fingrish" translation exists.  The "translation" given by e.g. Google translate (something about dog catching fish?) is just odd.  The fingrish is ridiculous even to us Finnish-speakers, although even in its mangled form, the proverb itself is still recognizable to us..

[apis]

So...

what does the fox say?

[Nominal Animal]

(1. Foxes don't "say"; either they're completely silent sneaking around, or they're screaming at the top of their lungs as if someone was chasing them with a chainsaw.  2. Ylvis is from Norway.)

[RoGeorge]

Indeed, languages are not just words translatable 1:1 to any other language.  Languages are also ways of thinking.  That is why loosing languages is very bad, because we are loosing thinking diversity.  Loosing diversity is very bad.  Diversity protects us in front of natural selection.  People don't understand the importance of keeping diversity, and in the last decade a sick current of uniformity is damaging humanity.

It's very useful that nowadays everybody speak English, yet is also very sad that in the same time we have extinguished languages combined with loss of languages diversity.
 

[vk6zgo]

It seems that a lot of the "Indigenglish" names in Australia were originally transcribed by Welsh speakers, Yorkshiremen, or whatever, as to most English speakers, they don't sound a lot like the same word spoken by a real indigenous person.

Maybe to the original transcriber, they sounded "near enough", & perhaps modern usage has diverged wildly from the original sound of the word.

Recently, there has been an attempt to reproduce the actual sound, which often ends up with horribly complex words, due to trying to do this with an English alphabet.

This sometimes ends up with monstrosities like Mandjoogoordap Drive, which is a bit of a shock to see on a road sign.
It is fairly easy to pronounce, though.

Whether or not my pronunciation is correct is something I'd have to check with someone who speaks the Noongar language.

[EEVblog]

There is no value in threads like this plastered with graphics here. Locked.