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by rvieira 1021 days ago
Cats "meow" (miˈaʊ̯) in all languages. Dogs can woof, blaf, ham, ao, ...
4 comments

Japanese uses “nyaa” for meow. I’m sure there are other counterexamples.
In hungarian when “[the cat is] meowing” we say “[a macska] nyávog”, which means to make sounds similar to ‘nyí’ [1]. Now that I think about it, it’s weird, because the we use “miáú” for the actual sound, but we don’t use the verb “miákol”, which apparently exists.

[1]: https://uesz.nytud.hu/index.html?uuid=a95e306a-7590-1014-865...

I would actually contend that "meow" and "nya" are pseudo-cognates, they are onomatopoeia of the same sound. M and N are both nasals, and iˈaʊ̯ and ia are close in vowel space.
Thanks! TIL that nyancat is something like "meowcat"
Can also add that dogs say "wan", which I found surprising. Seems even the onomatopoeia can differ quite a bit!
This isn't the same thing, but: in most indigenous languages of Latin America where Spanish is the national language, the word for cat is something like 'mees' (or 'mis' if you use the Spanish-like spelling). This is because cats were introduced in that area by the Spaniards, and a common way to call a cat in Spanish is 'mis-mis' (like saying "here kitty kitty" in English). One exception to that is Waorani (an indigenous language of Ecuador), where the word for cat is kitty (not their spelling). I'll let you guess why.
But, meow isn’t the word for cat, it’s the word for the sound a cat makes.
One would think animal sounds would be basically universal but it isn't so--other than meow I can't recall any animal sound that was understandable to my wife (native Mandarin speaker.)
The rooster sound is pretty different from one language to the other.
Imitative hiss noise? owl who?
I'm talking about the word for the sound, not imitations of the animal's actual sound. I have been understood imitating an animal.
It's called onomatopoeia and they're surprisingly different in many languages.