Thursday, August 19, 2004

Sounds of Sheep Around the World

I am from Jordan, I live in the Netherlands and I travel half the world.
What language do I speak? Bleatish of course. And since I am a plush toy sheep I speak - to be more precise - Fluf-Bleatish.

People just don't understand it - have never heart of Bleatish, don't bother bringing up Fluf-Bleatish - and think we make a sound like 'baaah'.
Well, at least English people do think so.
But what does the rest of the world think what sound sheep make?

On Sounds of the World's Animals - Sheep you can find an inventory of onomatopoetic representations of sheep sounds (in normal words: how do other people write 'baaah'). If you are interested, you can find there sounds of a number of other animals as well.

Sheep sounds around the world


Albanian: be-e be-e
Arabic (Algeria): baa baa
Catalan: beeee
Chinese (Mandarin): mieh mieh
Croatian: bee-hee
Danish: mæh
Dutch: bèèh
English: baaah
English (Old English): Scep blæt.
Esperanto: mek
Estonian: mää
Finnish: bäää bäää
French: bêêê
German: bähh, bähh
Hebrew: meeee meeee
Hindi: bhe:-bhe:
Hungarian: beeee
Icelandic: me
Italian: beeee
Japanese: mee
Korean: meeeee
Norwegian: bæ
Polish: meeeeee; be, be
Portuguese (Portugal): meee meee
Russian: bee
Slovene: bee-bee
Spanish (Spain): bee
Spanish (Argentina): meeee
Swedish: bää
Turkish: me-e-e-eh, me-e-e-eh
Ukrainian: be-be
Vietnamese: be-hehehe

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like this post! It is very interesting! And sheep are smarter than people, because they can understand each other all over the world...! (For example PeanutBear doesn't understand Chinese at all.....!)