Gramer girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

Rules in writing, words and cool stuff. This week I have a meeting middle about animal sounds

and a family act story. Let's get started.

Here's a question for you. In what world do barog, tut, toro, ba, pao-pao,

and u-u-u-all mean the same thing. It's in the wild world of animal sounds in how they're

expressed in different human languages. Those sounds I just made, there are words for the sound

an elephant makes when it trumpets. Expressed respectively in English, Finnish, German, Italian,

Japanese and Russian. And this phenomenon whereby an animal sound is expressed quite differently

in different languages isn't limited to elephants. For example, in English we think of a mouse going

squeak, but in German it goes peep peep and in Japanese chuchu. And in English we think of dogs

going woof or rough, but in Danish they go va-va-v. In German, wa-wao, in Russian, gav-gav,

and in French, u-a-wao, I think I'm getting at least close with those pronunciations. Forgive me if

I'm not. The diversity is so great that it inspired Derek Abbott, a professor at the University

of Adelaide in Australia, to put together a giant online spreadsheet just to list them.

When I was a child said Abbott, it frustrated me that I couldn't find these types of words in

the dictionary that drove me to start creating my own list. He did this by pulling scientists he

met at international conferences and asking them what would be written in the text balloon

coming from the mouth and cartoons of various animals. Clever, so far 27 scientists from 17

different countries have answered him. Despite the strangeness of their request, Abbott says

they're always delighted to help. So what gives? Why do different languages have such different

versions of what are essentially the same sounds? Isn't everyone around the world just imitating

observable natural phenomenon? Well, yes and no. The words for the sounds the animals make are

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