animal sounds

Animal Sounds

In Liddell and Scott's Greek lexicon you can find the following

onomatopoeic words:

* bauzo (to cry bau bau, to bark, cf. Latin baubor)

* be (the cry of sheep)

* gru (the sound a pig makes, cf. Latin grunnio)

They are not so different from English bow-wow, baa, grunt.

One Greek animal sound that doesn't sound familiar, at least to my

ear, is brekekekex koax koax, from Aristophanes' Frogs (line 209 and

elsewhere). K.J. Dover in his commentary says that "initial br-

appears in many Greek words denoting the production of sound" and also

that final -x is "a Greek spelling convention for the representation

of sounds." He concludes that "brekekekex seems thus to embody two

non-representational conventions." Apparently the Marsh Frog, Rana

ridibunda, does make a sound somewhat like brekekekex with br- and -x

removed.

One wishes that the notes of the Roman emperor Geta (died 212 A.D.) on

animal sounds had survived. Aelius Spartianus, Life of Geta 5.4-5, in

the Historia Augusta (tr. Anthony Birley), says:

He made a habit of propounding problems to grammarians, asking them

to say what sounds different animals make, for example: lambs

bleat, pigs grunt, doves coo, bears growl, lions roar, leopards

snarl, elephants trumpet, frogs croak, horses neigh, bulls bellow

-- and he would confirm these from old writers.

familiare illi fuit has quaestiones grammaticis proponere, ut

dicerent, singula animalia quomodo vocem emitterent, velut: agni

balant, porcelli grunniunt, palumbes minurriunt, ursi saeviunt,

leones rugiunt, leopardi rictant, elefanti barriunt, ranae coaxant,

equi hinniunt, asini rudunt, tauri mugiunt, easque de veteribus

adprobare.

Here are a few bibliographical references on Greek and Latin animal

sounds that I've collected over the years:

* Paul Kretschmer, "Su*s und andere lautnachahmende W�rter," Glotta

13 (1924) 132-138

* Karl Kunst, "mugire und rugire," Glotta 14 (1925) 109-113

* J.H.H. Schmidt, Handbuch der lateinischen und griechischen

Synonymik (Leipzig: Teubner, 1889), pp. 157-162 (Stimmen der

S�ugetiere) and 162-166 (Stimmen der V�gel, Lurche und Kerfe)

* Bruno Snell, "Das I-Ah des goldenes Esel," Hermes 70 (1935)

355-356

* W.B. Stanford, The Sounds of Greek (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1967), ch. V (Mimesis in Words), pp. 98-121,

esp. 102-103

* Wilhelm Wackernagel, Voces Variae Animantium (diss. Basel, 1867)

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David Rohrbacher comments:

I say with regret that Geta's work on animal sounds almost

certainly never existed, but is a joke by the scampy author of the

largely-fraudulent Historia Augusta (see Ronald Syme, Emperors and

Biography, page 62; on the fraudulence of the HA, see Peter White,

The Authorship of the Historia Augusta, Journal of Roman Studies 57

(1967) 115-33, and fuller and up-to-date treatment in Andre

Chastagnol, Histoire Auguste (1994)). The (single) author of the

HA, writing in the late fourth century, was probably a grammarian,

and the point of the passage is a parody of the kind of nit-picking

questions with which grammarians grappled (as seen, e.g., in Aulus

Gellius.)

He also adds some more articles:

* C.E. Finch, "Suetonius' catalogue of animal sounds in codex Vat.

Lat. 6018,"American Journal of Philology 90 (1969) 459-463