We tend to think of animal noises as falling into the language category of onomatopoeia — cats meow and cows moo– which is why I think it is so weird that different languages have different sounds to represent these animal sounds. Here are some for Japanese:
- cat: niya-niya
- dog: kan-kan or wun-wun
- pig: bu-bu
- sheep: meh
- horse: hi-hin
- cow: moo-moo (this is how they spell it put it sounds like mo-mo)
- owl: ho-ho
- frog: gero- gero (with a hard “g” sound)
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
