Crash, Bang, Wallop

This week I’ve been asking myself do different nations hear differently?   No I haven’t been listening to the Italian charts (although whenever I am unfortunate enough to catch the latest top ten hit I do wonder if a large percentage of the Italian population is tone deaf – but I also I wonder that whenever I’m confronted with the fact that Coldplay have a career.)  When travelling through various countries one of my personal joys has always been the different languages I have encountered and the little tricks I’ve gathered to cope – whilst navigating the Japanese transport system I quickly learnt to match the symbols on my ticket to the departures board with not a single mishap, when in a little town in the Tamil speaking part of India meeting a local who spoke no English and me only speaking Panjabi, of the multitude of Indian languages, we found that we could communicate in Italian of all languages.  As well as dealing with the new words and grammatical constructions there is the host of vocal and onomatopoeic sounds that make up a language.  While I expected words to be different I never really gave a thought to the onomatopoeia. 

In the UK and Aus (I hasten to add other English speaking Countries) the onomatopoeic word for a dog bark is woof, here dogs don’t woof woof they bau bau! Birds don’t go cheep cheep they cip cip and frogs don’t ribbit they cra cra.  It’s not just the world of animal sounds that are different, if an English speaker cuts their finger they will exclaim ouch or ow an Italian will say ahi or ahia as they apply pressure to the injured digit.  Crack a joke to a native English speaker and you will hopefully hear  ha ha or hee hee try to be funny in Italy ah, ah, eh, eh, ih, ih, or uh, uh is what your ego will be wanting to hear. Tuck into a Raji curry and yum yum or om nom nom is what I want to hear from an English speaker and gnam gnam from my Italian friends.  When it comes to bodily functions once again we are in a linguistically different world, an English speaker will fart or burp and an Italian will prot and rutt respectively.  Hearing brrrring will have me leaping for the phone and Italian will only do so if he hears a drin drin.  I knock on a door while my Italian chums toc.  In Australia my floorboards would creek here they cric crac.

These onomatopoeic sounds seem so hard wired and often come from instant emotions that I cannot believe that I would ever be able to make them part of my lexical repertoire.  Yet when I talk to my long term expect friends I’m amazed that they do make the Italian exclamation when in pain, or just generally pissed off while driving.       

These differences while unimportant do make me wonder, do we hear sounds differently or is it just out different languages that result in the divergent interpretations?  The Japanese language has no L sound and Japanese speakers have great difficulty in identifying and pronouncing when speaking English.  Studies have shown that as newborns Japanese children can hear the L sound but as they grow and the brain develops to acquire language skills they lose the ability to identify the sound due to not hearing it spoken.  Does this explain why different nations interpret the same sound differently?  One theory of linguistic development argues that language developed from early humans making onomatopoeic words from the sounds around them.  I’m way to ignorant to speculate on such things but this week once again I have been reminded what an amazingly rich, complex and beautiful beast language is.