Well, it’s because during our summer school, one of our students rented a room in Zone 1, near the British Museum. You may be wondering why we’re talking about all of this today. I used to teach a lot of closed Japanese groups and spent some time work ing in Hiroshima, where I learned that Japanese is very rich in onomatapoeic words, but that none of them sounded anything like I’d imagine things to sound myself! I mean, when someone yawns, do you hear fuwaa? Does heavy rain make a zaa-zaa noise? And do bombs explode with a dokan? Nope! For me neither. I first realised when I started learning Indonesia and noticed that in comics, dogs said guk! guk! when barking – not woof! woof! I still remember the hilarity that resulted when I first asked a class of international students what dogs said – and learned that Turkish dogs say hev hev, Spanish dogs guau guau, Japanese dogs wang wang, Icelandic dogs voff voff and so on. They are, however, very culturally rooted. We take these words for granted and think it must be obvious to everyone that these things just sound like this. If we only speak one language, we hardly ever even notice such words as buzz or thud, and if we do stop to think about them, we automatically assume that these are just the noises that insects make they fly or that something heavy – like a sack of potatoes – makes when it falls to the ground.

Officially, it’s the use of words that supposedly sound like the sounds they refer to.

Slap the fly online