I Never Knew There Was a Word for It - Adam Jacot De Boinod [37]
Chirping cuckoos
The Basques of the Pyrenees also use highly expressive words. You might recognize such terms as kuku (a cuckoo), miau (miaou), mu (moo), durrunda (thunder), zurrumurru (a whisper) and urtzintz (to sneeze), but could you guess the meaning of these?
thu to spit
milikatu to lick
tchiuka to chirp
chichtu to whistle
uhurritu to howl
chehatu to chew
karruskatu to gnaw
False friends
rang (Chinese) to yell, shout
boo (Latin) to cry out, resound
hum (Ainu, Japan) sound, feeling
rumore (Italian) noise
bum (Turkish) bang
Sounds Japanese
The Japanese can be equally imitative: shikushiku is to cry continuously while sniffling, and zeizei is the sound of air being forced through the windpipe when one has a cold or respiratory illness. We can hear perhaps a gathering of Japanese women in kusukusu, to giggle or titter, especially in a suppressed voice; and of men in geragera, a belly laugh. Moving from the literal to the more imaginative, the Japanese have sa, the sound of a machine with the switch on, idling quietly; sooay sooay, fish swimming; susu, the sound of air passing continuously through a small opening.
Gitaigo describes a more particular Japanese concept: words that try to imitate not just sounds, but states of feeling. So gatcha gatcha describes an annoying noise; harahara refers to one’s reaction to something one is directly involved in; and ichaicha is used of a couple engaging in a public display of affection viewed as unsavoury by passers-by. Mimicry of feelings extends to descriptions of the way we see: so jirojiro is to stare in fascination; tekateka is the shiny appearance of a smooth (often cheap-looking) surface; pichapicha is splashing water; and kirakira is a small light that blinks repeatedly.
Sounds familiar
Not all words about sound are imitative; or perhaps it’s just that things strike the ear differently in other parts of the world:
bagabaga (Tulu, India) the crackling of a fire
desir (Malay) the sound of sand driven by the wind
faamiti (Samoan) to make a squeaking sound by sucking air past the lips in order to gain the attention of a dog or children
riman (Arabic) the sound of a stone thrown at a boy
ghiqq (Persian) the sound made by a boiling kettle
kertek (Malay) the sound of dry leaves or twigs being trodden underfoot
lushindo (Bemba, Congo and Zambia) the sound of footsteps
nyangi (Yindiny, Australia) any annoying noise
yuyin (Chinese) the remnants of sound which remain in the ears of the hearer
On reflection
Top ten
In terms of numbers of speakers, the top ten world languages are as follows:
1 Mandarin 1,000+ million
2 English 508 million
3 Hindi 497 million
4 Spanish 342 million
5 Russian 277 million
6 Arabic 246 million
7 Bengali 211 million
8 Portuguese 191 million
9 Malay–Indonesian 159 million
10 French 129 million
Seeing Things
cattiva è quella lana che non si puo tingere (Italian)
it is a bad cloth that will take no colour
Colourful language
We might well think that every language has a word for every colour, but this isn’t so. Nine languages distinguish only between black and white. In Dan, for example, which is spoken in New Guinea, people talk in terms of things being either mili (darkish) or mola (lightish).
Twenty-one languages have distinct words for black, red and white only; eight have those colours plus green; then the sequence in which additional colours are brought into languages is yellow, with a further eighteen languages, then blue (with six) and finally brown (with seven).
Across the spectrum
As with colours, so with the rainbow. The Bassa language of Liberia identifies only two colours: ziza (red/orange/yellow) and hui (green/ blue/purple) in their spectrum. The Shona of Zimbabwe