[quote=“Mr He”]The only reason to that Taiwanese/Chinese dogs go 'wang" is that you only have a limited number of consonant finals in Mandarin.
You don’t have -f, but only
Now we’re onto something! English words that end in -f have to end in -ng in Chinese! And it works - in English, we say “roof,” but in Chinese they say “wu ding”. And we all already know that “woof” has to become “wong”.
I think what he is getting at is there is no bopomofa for wa (without a final) and the system is not flexible enough that one could be created to more accurately describe the sound that a dog actually makes. English is more flexible this way and so has evolved the eminnently reasonable ARF! as well as a few other varieties which reflect to some extent a dogs wonderful virtuosity.
'Tis sociolinguistic conditioning. We assume we know what “sound that a dog actually makes” - the same way that English words can be described pretty well in English, the nuances of which prove their superiority to all other linguistic forms (especially Chinese) - the same logic that argues we have better words for colors, emotions, objects, ideas, etc.
I’d call it ethnocentrism, but Chinese speakers feel they also have a monopoly on correct renderings (and French is eminently more flexible than Chinese, and Thai so much more accurate than French, and so on).
Seriously, try this experiment in cultural myopia - attempt to convince any native speaker of Chinese that “arf” “woof” “ruff” and “bark” are more accurate than “wang.” The quick rejoinder to my attempt was that our having four or more forms just shows that we have no idea what sound a dog really makes. In fact, my friend concluded by saying, “Just think about it. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Dogs really just say ‘wang’”
Sometimes my dogs bark, sometimes they say wang, sometimes they just sit in Zenlike silence, licking their balls. Maybe the final sounds in bopomofo or western phonetic systems just don’t apply to dogspeak.
Harvey’s response there is what I was trying to get at in a more smartarse fashion. To us, dogs say “woof” or whatever because that’s what we’ve always taken as the term for it. It’s what we’ve grown up with, and so to us, it’s right. That doesn’t mean we’re actually right, just right enough for us.
I have to go and make dogs bark now and watch their facial expressions.
Seems if they finish a bark with their doggy lips together then its fffff
Final ffffffffff in Chinese does happen when they play tennis (maybe).
Thats the sound my dog makes at home sometimes, but dogs can make more than one sound. If they only went woof they wouldn’t be saying much, but they don’t just say woof, in fact both my dogs have come up with some pretty interesting sounds. That said a friend of mine told me that Wong Wong was kind of like luck or lucky or something along those lines, which is why people here say wong wong instead of woof woof, could be wrong though:) but my dog still says bawawaooooo, yipe, woof, rrrrrrrr, arf and all the rest of it. doggies have a very diverse language.
Here’s an interesting article at least partly on the subject from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i32/32a01201.htm
[quote]The latest findings to come out of the department suggest that dogs’ barks have evolved into a relatively sophisticated way of communicating with humans. Adam Mikl
You and Tetsuo are letting your cultural relativity blind you to the fact that dogs make a range of actual sounds. Hence a set of phonetic symbols can be considered a more or less accurate representation of those actual sounds. Chinese appears to have one “word” that they use to represent the sounds that a dog makes and that word isn’t very accurate. English has a number of words and quite a few of them are better phonetics than wang. Not that wang delivered with the right attitude is such a disaster really but usually it isn’t deleivered that way. Anyway the English words ARF BARK RUFF Aroooo! etc both represent the sound more accurately and reflect more of the range that dogs are capable of. This is yet another example of why alphabetic systems are, heck I’ll say it, superior.
This isn’t about cultural relativeity, this is the simple fact that none of us speak Dog. All our attempts to represent sounds that are not part of our language are clumsy, regardless what language you speak. And again, we only think arf, bark, ruff, etc. are right because we’ve never thought about them any other way. They’re not right, but they’re right enough. I agree that I don’t think ‘wang’ sounds like a dog, but that doesn’t make it wrong, nor does it make me right. The only accurate source for what a dog sounds like is a dog.
And by the way, this also has bugger all to do with alphabetic versus character-based languages. It has everything to do with the phonetic ranges of each language though, which are not restricted by the writing system. The writing system represents the phonetics, it doesn’t define them.
Bob, are you arguing that the more words a language has for an animal noise, the more superior it is
Lets take as a starting point the fact that dogs make a range of “actual” sounds and that these “actual” sounds can then be represented more or less accurately. If I suggested that the most common sound a dog makes is actually “serendipity” you would probably disagree and for good reason. By the same reasoning it is easy to see that the range of words used in English to represent the sounds that a dog make comes closer to describing that wonderful diversity than the Chinese equivalent “wang”. It is perhaps more of a stretch to suggest that were Mandarin to employ an aphabetic writing system it would be more likely to invent sounds. It’s not much of a stretch though. The reason Chinese has failed to come up with a more accurate representation is precisely because a more accurate “syllable” doesn’t already exist. Rather than create a new, better word using individual sounds they stick with what comes to them pre-packaged in the form of a single syllable. Wang is as close as they got so wang is a close as they get. This would be less likely if they used an alphabet.
I’m not arguing for the superiority of Western culture here but the superiority of alphabetic writing systems is something I will assert until someone manages to change my mind on the issue. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
This is pure bullshit bob. Sorry to say it, but it’s true. Even if Chinese was alphabetic, there would still be no combinations in the entire language which ended in an “f” sound. It just doesn’t exist in Mandarin. Not because of characters or whatever your latest hardon against written Chinese is, but because it’s not there. English can’t represent every sound either - how do you accurately distinguish, in English, between the English “sh”, and the sounds in Chinese represented by pinyin “x” and “sh”? How do you spell that little clicky noise in some African languages?
Chinese doesn’t not use “woof” because it doesn’t use an alphabet - it doesn’t use “woof” because the sound simply doesn’t exist in Chinese. Japanese isn’t resricted by characters, and something approaching “woof” is actually possible in Japanese, but instead they say dogs say “wan”. Why is that, oh mighty linguist?
And another point - why is it, if “woof” is apparently so accurate, that going by that list previously posted, there seems to be a fairly decent split between “woof”-esque sounds and “wa” sounds (which “wang” could very easily be classed as)? Perhaps “wang” as it is today is a hangover, evolved to fit modern Chinese phonetics, of an ancient term?
As an aside - how often, in any language, do you actually say “woof” or its local equivalent? Seriously.
You’ve all got it wrong. Dogs go “Hello”, “I want it”, “Run around”, and “I want my mama.”
Click here if you don’t believe me.
No more of this “wang” versus “woof” silliness.
Now Bob why on earth would anyone agree with that? Trees make actual sounds when they fall down, my cell phone makes an actual sound when I close it, and my ass makes actual sounds when I eat too much red bean. There’s no such thing as accuracy when it comes to representation of these sounds - only ways of representation. Some may cluster with like phonemes, others wildly different - either way, as I’ve said time and time again, people tend to believe their own linguistic map to be accurate/superior - and as you’ve shown time and time again, you’re no exception.
Since Tetsuo did such a fine job with the “f” I’ll leave that f to you.
I love it when the linguistics gurus get a hold of a light hearted thread - I mean geeeeeeez it’s in the “Pets & Other Animals” forum 
[quote=“truant”]I love it when the linguistics gurus get a hold of a light hearted thread - I mean geeeeeeez it’s in the “Pets & Other Animals” forum [/quote]Some of us are just itching for a good argument I guess 
no you’re not.
no you’re not.[/quote]
Oh yes we are! What, you think this aint lighthearted? Myeh myeh myeh myeh myeh!
Detractors be damned, more onomatopoeia fun! Yo Bob, remember your “more is better” idea? Well, Japanese has more onomatopoeia than any other language - whole dictionaries of giseigo and gitaigo and gijoogo. Wanna give it up and admit that Japanese is a far more accurate language than English?
Ooooh yeah and and guess what the wiki says about onomatopoeia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia
Ah great gobshites that means that though there may be accuracy, neither English nor Chinese (well, at least Cantonese) has it! What are we to do?
But what about Tetsuo and my idea that animals don’t speak? That animal sounds can’t be captured accurately in human language? Howz about an excerpt from “Onomatopoeia: Cuckoo-Language and Tick-Tocking, The Constraints of Semiotic Systems” by Reuven Tsur
http://www.trismegistos.com/IconicityInLanguage/Articles/Tsur/default.html
Bob, I know none of this convinces you. But I can’t wait to hear your retort. Come back, ya hear? Maybe back yourself up with something?
Now if this aint fun, I don’t know what is. 
Japanese is a total and utter bastard for onomatopoeia. Seriously. I hated running across any of that stuff.
I wonder if this should be moved to Teaching English! Teaching Caninese?