Comment by p-e-w
4 hours ago
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.
[flagged]
I don't think the insight is trivial, but to each their own I suppose.