CHUI SUI CENTRAL

The land where frogs quack

Animal sounds around the world are a minefield for a travelling author

IT WAS ONE of the weirdest bits of news I ever had to break. “Something unusual is infesting the earth under our apartment block,” I told my neighbour. “I think it’s a herd of cows.” Below our building and the field nearby could be heard the unmistakable “mooooo” of large cattle. It went on for days. Yet none of my encyclopedias, nor that trusty compiler of oddities, the Internet, had any information on “burrowing cows”. The closest I could get was “ground beef”.

The mystery was eventually solved by Georgina Noyce, a columnist who writes about animals. She told me that the Asiatic painted frog does not go ribbit like many frogs, but makes a moo noise like a cow. Echoing underground drains amplify their voices to make them sound loud and terrifying, like karaoke machines do for my banker friend Julian, who used to live upstairs from me until I told him I would take out a court order against his rendition of Achy Breaky Heart.

I once had to speak at a school in mainland China, and began an extremely long story with plot-points which hinged on animal noises. In the tale, a chicken makes its normal buk-buk-buk noise, which is heard by the characters as “book, book, book”. A frog makes its usual ribbit-ribbit-ribbit noise, which is heard as “read it, read it, read it”.

I was well into the tale when I realised that the 900 kids listening to me had no idea what I was talking about. With horror I recalled that the sound chickens make is not perceived in China as “buk-buk-buk”, but “gordok, gordok, gordok”. Worse still, in that area, frogs quack like ducks. I once sat next to a busy frog pond in Guangzhou which sounded like a convention of Donald Duck impersonators. (Frogs in Germany also quack.)

Animal sounds are minefields for a travelling storyteller. In the Philippines, roosters go “tiktilaooo”, in Mexico, “kikiriki”, and in Portugal, “coco-ro-coco”. The prize for Most Accurate goes to Indonesia, where the sound is described as “kukuruyuuu”. And Least Accurate? English speakers (this is not a joke) believe roosters wake up every morning and say "cock a doodle doo". 30 | SAI KUNG

But Indonesians lose their crown for accuracy when it comes to frogs, which they hear as saying “Tekotek, tekotek”. Huh? English speakers redeem themselves when they describe pig-speech as “oink, oink”. Compare that to the Japanese rendering of pig grunts as “boo-boo, boo-boo”. No way.

Dogspeak is a highly contentious matter. Indonesian hounds go: “Guk, guk, guk!” while Filipino ones say: “Aw, aw, aw!” European ones say “Wau, wau,wau ” but American ones go “Woof-woof”. I think I would give the prize for accuracy to the Chinese, who claim dogs say, “Houh, houg, houg” and the least accurate to the British, who believe, incredibly, that hounds go: “Bow wow”.

On my travels, I came across two books on this subject. Everywhere the Cow Says Moo! by Ellen Slusky Weinstein was charming but inaccurate. Bengali cows go “hamba” and Dutch cows say “boeh”, according to a funwith-words book called The Meaning of Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod.

Are there animals which say the same thing around the world? Yes. Almost everywhere I’ve travelled, the sound a cat makes is described as “meow” or something similar (“miau” in German, “ming” in Tagalog). Oddly, the speakers of Nahuatl, a language in Mexico, hear meow as “tlatzomia” but I think that can be classified under the heading ‘Just Plain weird’. I blame it on the tequila.

Anyway, back to the scene at the school in China. So there I was, in mid-sentence, realising that the story I was telling would make absolutely no sense to my audience. I had no idea what to do. So I simply continued, leaping around and doing animal impressions, extending the story as far as I could. The children roared with laughter. The teacher told me afterwards: "The first time you came, you told them a story. That was okay. But this time you just talked like a crazy man, made no sense. I think they like this better."

Nury Vittachi can be contacted at nury@ vittachi.com or through his Facebook page