Comment by potsandpans
5 hours ago
> So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.
There's probably an overlap that makes the distinction fuzzy.
5 hours ago
> So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.
There's probably an overlap that makes the distinction fuzzy.
There’s an overlap, but the observation from the parent comment turns this widely cited phenomenon from a supposed mystery or deep insight into something trivial.
It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.
I hope you understand that just because a proposed explanations makes intuitive sense, it doesn't automatically have to be right.
Edit - it seems there's evidence that this intuitive explanation is wrong, see the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146562
This is why I like to remind myself that the world is much more interesting than I often think, which is why the drive to jump to simple and boring explanations can often be a trap.
Interestingly, in practice different languages tend to have markedly different common representations of animal sounds.
In Korean, dogs say meong (멍), sounds like mung) rather than woof.
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I don't think the insight is trivial, but to each their own I suppose.