# What are these "people sounds" in other languages? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 18, 2010, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622 "2010-08-18T15:29:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![EdwardLost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/bbe5ce/32.png) [@EdwardLost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdwardLost)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2010, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/21 "2010-08-19T17:02:22Z")
> [@Chessic\_Sense](#): > > Every once in a while, someone will point out that to non-English speakers, animals make “different” sounds than we think. For example, Ukranians think ducks go “krya krya” while we hear “quack quack”. [This](http://www.lonympics.co.uk/AAAaC.htm) site gives a full list. > > Instead of animal sounds, I want to know about people sounds. In other languages, what’s the equivalent of the following: > Phew! > Ugh. > Heh. > Tee-hee. > A-choo! > Grrrr. > Yay! > Aww(, man :() > Aww(, he’s so cute :)) > Mmm-hmm (yes) > Uh-uh (no) > Tsk. > Pfsh. > …any others you can think of. > > I know that Middle Eastern Arabs have a tongue click with slight, abrupt head tilt to mean “Mm-hmm”. The GF already mentioned the German multi-purpose “doh” for, as far as I can tell, “Ah!” or “Yay!” or “heh”. A-choo is in a different category than the rest. That’s a traditional “spelling” of an instinctive or otherwise non-cultural, human sound. The actual sound is the same in all cultures but the written representation would be different (like animal noises). Other examples would be for burps, farts, knuckles cracking, puking, smacking, babies and children crying, spontaneous laughter, finger snaps… The rest are like semi-words (or something), sounds we would make voluntarily to express a feeling or emotion. The sounds themselves could differ from culture to culture. Even if the sounds are the same the “spelling” might differ. ---
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2010, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/22 "2010-08-19T17:08:12Z")
> [@acsenray](#): > > > [@ChrisBooth12](#): > > > > In english the cow goes moo but that is really what it sounds like. > > Nope. Cows are unable to form a bilabial nasal sonorant that sounds anything like it does in English. Listen more carefully next time, and you’ll hear that the actual sound is nothing like “moo.” It’s not a party until the linguist shows up. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2010, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/23 "2010-08-19T18:48:45Z")
I’m still curious how one represents the raspberry (if at all) in other languages. “pbbbt” doesn’t really convey it, but I don’t know what would. Is it used to indicate derision in other languages? If not, what is an equivalent? ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2010, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/24 "2010-08-19T21:56:28Z")
> [@VinylTurnip](#): > > > [@acsenray](#): > > > > Nope. Cows are unable to form a bilabial nasal sonorant that sounds anything like it does in English. Listen more carefully next time, and you’ll hear that the actual sound is nothing like “moo.” > > It’s not a party until the linguist shows up. He’s got to be cunning, though. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2010, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/25 "2010-08-19T23:07:42Z")
When I speak, I have the unfortunate habit of inserting “um” all over the place. In high school, I had to give an oration of some sort for a Latin class, and the teacher couldn’t break me of the habit. So he told me to use “eu” instead, that being the Latin equivalent of “um”. ---
**Author:** ![MoodIndigo1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e8c25b/32.png) [@MoodIndigo1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MoodIndigo1)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/26 "2010-08-20T00:53:36Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > > [@MoodIndigo1](#): > > > > A-choo!= I dunno, atchoo, I guess > > At-choum Thanks, I just couldn’t remember it. ---
**Author:** ![kim\_jung\_il](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/54ee81/32.png) [@kim\_jung\_il](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kim_jung_il)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/27 "2010-08-20T03:08:24Z")
In Korea, dogs say “mung mung”, ducks say “kak kak” and pigs say “gool gool”. They say “ah chee” when they sneeze, “ung” for a yes sound and “a-eesh” is a sounds that people make when they are disappointed or disgusted. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/28 "2010-08-20T06:36:58Z")
> [@bordelond](#): > > **Nava** , do you have a read on whether there are differing uses of onomatopeia between Castillian speakers and folks in Mexico or Puerto Rico (perhaps under the influence of Anglo neighbors)? I am wondering if American newspaper comics – especially huge cultural icons like Peanuts or Garfield – would ever get translated and appear in newspapers in proximate Spanish-speaking cities such as Mexico City or San Juan. I was talking about comics written originally in Spanish and in Spain; I’m less familiar with LAR material (outside of Mafalda, an Argentinian comic strip which is an enormous part of Hispanic popular culture). I can tell you that in comics translated from English, the noises are usually treated as part of the drawing and therefore left unchanged; dirty language, which in the Spanish-from-Spain tradition is represented using drawings inside the balloon (lightning bolts, donkeys, pigs, geometric figures…), in translated comics uses the same resources as in its original language, substituting letters. I have seen Mortadelo y Filemón and other Escobar comics in the US translated to English, but it was 25 years ago: I’m at work so I can’t really explore and find their US name but see if [these guys](http://www.mortadeloyfilemon.com) look familiar. This has in turn led to some onomatopeias entering Spanish, but still: people see an off-scene **BARF** in a translated comic and know that someone is throwing up, but Spanish-from-Spain artists would instead draw someone looking into the bathroom where someone else’s bum can be seen in the position required to worship the porcelain god, no noises added. I’ve also seen it done by showing someone run to the bathroom with his hand over his mouth and eyes bulging, then coming back a couple of panels later wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Like for any other word, some onomatopoeias will enter the language faster than others and some will enter it faster in some locations (the Spanish of Northern Mexico and Costa Rica shows a lot more influence from English than others do, in my limited experience); there is a Mafalda (Argentina, c. 1970) about the replacement of “¡pum!” with “bang!”, but 40 years later you still hear “pum”: you will never see it in a translated comic, because it’s part of the artwork, and you’re likely to see “bang” in a drawn-in-Spanish comic, but children still say “pum”. Take into account that the way we would read that “bang” is not the way an English-speaker would, when people try to pronounce that “ng” as two distinct sounds like we’re wont to do it’s just real difficult. So, we may write bang (as part of background artwork) but we pronounce pum. Peanuts (“Carlitos” in Spain, Peanuts in (some?) LAR) and Garfield have both been syndicated to Spanish for ages. The first movie I watched was “Snoopy come home” in Spain in the early 70s, and Carlitos was already popular by that time. ---
**Author:** ![AnnaKareninja](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@AnnaKareninja](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AnnaKareninja)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/29 "2010-08-20T07:23:23Z")
Chinese ducks go gwaah-gwaah Chinese people go AH-Chieh, for ah Choo Ai-yah! (Oh Noes!) Waaah, in a whispery awed way for Wow! Ey- youh! - sarcastically high pitched and drawn out for when someone gets too big for their boots; just high pitched and drawn out for squee; abruptly for surprise. Ka-chah!-quickly said to emulate something brittle that has been broken. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/30 "2010-08-20T12:00:32Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > It doesn’t eschew onomatopoeia, what happens is that the whole way in which the action is represented is different. We don’t represent someone barfing by using barf sounds, we just say they barfed (in English that’s an onomatopoeia; in Spanish we say they “returned”, “threw the pota” pota here meaning the results of barfing and not the cephalopod, or the euphemistic “got sick” - no onomatopoeias). Spelling dialectal variations is also something Not Done, while in English it’s all over the place. We just explain things in a different way. Mexican Spanish is more onomatapoeia-oriented than Iberian Spanish, at least in its less formal registers. For example, “huaquear” (“wahck-ay-ar”) is an informal (but common and far from vulgar) way to say “puke” – the derivative phrase “¡huácala!”, meaning, “yuck!”, is vey common. Then, there are the even less formal, jocularly vulgar ways to say “puke” which are equally onomatapoetic, such as “cantar Oaxaca” (“sing Oaxaca” – Oaxaca is a state in Mexico, pronounced very much like a tossing of the tacos). (Interestingly, women tend to get less exposure than men to phrases like this (at least in rural and more conservative parts of Mexico) – in Mexican Spanish, there is more of a tendency to “not say certain things when women are present” than there is in, say, US English. Maybe that’s why Nava would not have heard these phrases if/when she visited Mexico.) ---
**Author:** ![Peanuthead](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peanuthead/32/360_2.png) [@Peanuthead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peanuthead)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/31 "2010-08-20T21:47:06Z")
Filipinos say **Arai!** for **Ouch!** ---
**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2010, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/32 "2010-08-22T17:02:57Z")
> [@EdwardLost](#): > > A-choo is in a different category than the rest. That’s a traditional “spelling” of an instinctive or otherwise non-cultural, human sound. The actual sound is the same in all cultures but the written representation would be different (like animal noises). Other examples would be for burps, farts, knuckles cracking, puking, smacking, babies and children crying, spontaneous laughter, finger snaps… I don’t think it is. I don’t think that the sneezing sound is a “non-cultural, human sound”. People sneeze in all kinds of different ways, and a lot of them use the vocal chords. I sneeze in an American accent. I’ve heard people from other regions sneeze in their accent. My father, for instance, intentionally vocalizes the sound into words. He “speaks” his sneezes. It stands to reason that non-English speakers would use entirely different words, even if they’re similar. > [@Reply](#): > > Are you asking how they would be written differently or how they would be pronounced? Pronounced. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2010, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/33 "2010-08-22T17:40:34Z")
> [@](#): > > dirty language, which in the Spanish-from-Spain tradition is represented using drawings inside the balloon (lightning bolts, donkeys, pigs, geometric figures…), FYI, this is the convention in American comics, too, though it’s more likely to be characters from the top row of the keyboard, or other simple shapes, than barnyard animals. The word for such symbols, incidentally, is “[grawlix](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grawlix)”. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2010, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/34 "2010-08-22T19:42:33Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > Ugh. - Igitt resp. Pfui This use of “resp.” or “respectively” is something I often see in English written by German-speakers. It seems to be a rendering of German “bzw”. Unfortunately it’s a mistranslation as the correct English usage is “X or Y, respectively”, not “X respectively Y”. I’m sorry if it seems like I’m picking on you - it’s just something I’ve been curious about for years: is it something you learn in English class at school? Or does it simply come from looking up “beziehungsweise” in a dictionary and slotting it into the same place in the sentence? ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2010, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/35 "2010-08-22T20:39:09Z")
No, it’s just plain ignorance or forgetfulness, respectively. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Torque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/36 "2010-08-23T15:01:58Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > When I speak, I have the unfortunate habit of inserting “um” all over the place. In high school, I had to give an oration of some sort for a Latin class, and the teacher couldn’t break me of the habit. So he told me to use “eu” instead, that being the Latin equivalent of “um”. My Japanese teacher used to call those “hesitation noises”, the sound you use to indicate, “I’m thinking of what to say next.” The ones I heard most in Japanese were pronounced like “eh-toe” and “ah-no”, drawing out the last vowel sound as long as you needed. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/37 "2010-08-24T17:59:08Z")
Okay, I have a related but slightly…erm…off-color question here. Recently, I happened across, in my internet searches, porn in what sounds like Spanish or Portuguese. I’m not terribly familiar with either language, but it sounds like the woman in the video “pronounces” the super-fake female orgasm sounds of porn as “Oy! Oy! Oy! Oy! (etc.)” Is this just an idiosyncrasy of that “actress” or is this the cultural idea of what a female orgasm sounds like? ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/38 "2010-08-24T22:26:22Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > No, it’s just plain ignorance or forgetfulness, respectively. 😉 🙂 Fair enough, though you are not the only one, so the mystery remains. Sorry for picking up on this one small infelicity in your otherwise perfect written English. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2010, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/39 "2010-08-25T02:44:55Z")
On the subject of sneezes, has anyone noticed that a lot of the words you say after a sneeze sound sort of like a sneeze themselves? Bless you, gesundheit, à tes souhaits, jesús, and so forth. The sound and sense compatibility is so strong that when I was a little kid I thought that “à tes souhaits” was actually the verb for “to sneeze” (j’atessoue, tu atessoues,…) ---
**Author:** ![grimpixie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecb155/32.png) [@grimpixie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/grimpixie)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2010, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622/40 "2010-08-25T06:48:37Z")
In Afrikaans: Phew! = Sjoe!! Ugh. = Aggg (with a gutteral g - think the ch sound in loch) Ouch = Eina!! Yay! = Hoera!! Most of the rest are the same as English [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-people-sounds-in-other-languages/550622.md?page=3)