Pudding – Onomatopoeia Odyssey: “For many, our first memories of learning animal sounds include the song “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” The song has been translated into at least 25 languages, and a curious finding reveals itself when we compare these translations: English cows go “moo”, while French cows go “meuh”, and Korean cows go “음메” . These differences raise the question: how can cultures hear the same physical sounds yet translate them into language so differently? Analyzing animal onomatopoeia across languages can demystify how we shape sound into meaning. Languages differ in their characters and spelling, so we can use a common tool of linguists to effectively compare how they sound. The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, is used to show how words are pronounced in any language. Each letter in the alphabet represents a singular sound, also known as a phone. IPA phones give us insight into the place of articulation (the part of the mouth that’s used to produce the sound), manner of articulation (the way the sound is produced), and voicing (whether the vocal folds come together). Here’s how a cat’s sound in English is transcribed to IPA… Let’s take a look at how a few animals sound across 21 popular languages. In the following examples, phones are grouped and color-coded to show their phonetic similarity…”