Why do pigs oink?
Why do pigs snort? And why do we call their snorts \u201coink\u201d in English? We\u2019re taking our exploration of animal noises in two directions today. First we\u2019ll learn about why we use different words to describe animal noises, depending on what language we\u2019re speaking. And then we\u2019ll examine what animals are actually saying when they oink or tweet or moo! Our guests are linguist and author Arika Okrent and bioacoustic researcher Elodie Briefer, of the University of Copenhagen. Other questions we tackle in this episode: Do cows make different amounts of \u201cmoos\u201d to say different words? Why do ducks make loud noises? Why do roosters cockadoodle-do in the morning? PLUS, so many kids sent us animal noises in different languages and we\u2019ll hear them all!
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Bioacoustics is the study of sounds made in nature. Scientists like Elodie Briefer study how animals make sounds and what information we can find in those sounds. Scientists will record sounds and use computers to measure and analyze what they hear and use observational skills to help determine what the sounds might mean.
\nAnimals speak in emotion, not in words. Pigs have contact calls as well as positive and negative calls. Researchers have found that pigs will make longer calls when they are unhappy. Scientists and animal welfare advocates hope to use this information to eventually develop an app that farmers can use to improve animals\u2019 lives on farms.
\nWith words like moo, oink and cockadoodle-do, we are giving a name to a sound. But we\u2019re not just trying to mimic the sound. Most of us can make the sound of a pig snort but we need words like oink because we don\u2019t want to stop using our language to make a pig snort in the middle of a conversation.
\nHuman voices are capable of millions of sounds but a language only uses a subset of those sounds. Our animal noise words will use the sounds available in our individual languages.
\nWords that sound like the sound they are describing are called onomatopoeia.
\nAn animal has to have some cultural importance for a language to create a word for its call. That\u2019s why we don\u2019t have words in English for the noise a camel or a sloth would make. In Turkish there is no word for a pig call because that culture doesn\u2019t keep pigs on farms.
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