baa © Lilly Schwartz 2012

Did you know that animal sounds are not represented in the same way in different languages? There used to be an interesting little show on the German French TV channel Arte, which is about little everyday things that are different in Germany and France. It first made me realise that these things can be really different indeed. I think the chicken sound was the strangest, but I can’t quite remember now. Must have been more than 10 years ago that I saw that show. In English people say ‘baa’ when illustrating the sound a sheep makes. In German it’s ‘mäh’. Although generally similar it’s still different with respect to both the consonant and the vowel, which surprised me when I just looked it up. For me the English representation sounds wildly inaccurate. So, if you think about it, our culture can somehow change how we perceive sounds, which is really weird!