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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Any non-Asian languages use onomatopoeia as the basis for animal nouns? In Vietnamese, the words for some common animals are basically the sound associated with said animal, like referring to a cat as a "meow":

https://translate.google.com/?um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-...

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The funny thing is that "bo" means cow not only in Vietnamese but also in Irish, as well as in some Italian dialects (though Irish and Italian share the Indo-European roots). Does anybody know if the Vietnamese is in any way connected?

'bo*' is pretty common for cows in european languages - they are the genus 'bos' after all (see: english 'bovine').

As for the Vietnamese roots, I thought it might have been a French loanword but it looks like it came from a proto-vietnamese language: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%B2#Etymology_1

The Google etymology viewer is pretty good for this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=etymology%20cow

I have just made the most shallow research, but in Swedish (and other Scanian languages) cattle are called "boskap". The etymology is shared with "bo", meaning dwelling (animal or human house). The original meaning of "boskap" is that which belongs to the house.

I'm wonder if it might be shared with the other languages, that cows and sheep share the name of the dwelling because they are part of it?

Looking further at the etymology of (Swedish) "bo", it seems it comes from the Proto-Indo European "bhuh", to become, to grow into being, sharing the same etymology as English' "be". In Swedish, "bo" is also a verb meaning "to live (some place)", e.g. "I live here": "jag bor här".

Edit: Actually, "be" has a mixed history it seems. Indeed it is mixed with "to reside". See here for more etymology: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/be#Etymology

Edit II: After a bit more of Wiktionary, "bo" has the exact same meaning as in Swedish in Cuiba, a language with less than 3000 speakers in Colombia and Venezuela. Wow!

When it comes to the cows though, my original research might have been misguided. Looking at the etymology for Latin "bos", it comes from a different Indo European root: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bos#Latin

French had a big impact on Viet culture and I believe were in some part related to the romanization of the language. To me Viet seems like Cantonese written in latin script, with borrowed French words. I don't know it very well obviously.

Not quite what you are asking for, but in Danish you tell kids that a dog is a wuf-wuf-dog and a cow is a muu-cow, etc., basically concatenating the onomatopoeia and the normal noun together.

A few onomatopoeia have also evolved into nouns, such as vov (wuf) is the basis for vovse (informal for dog)

The woof bark doggo

Similarly in english we use "yappy dog" to describe little chihuahua like dogs. You can drop dog, or substitute it for a superlative of your choice and everyone will understand what you mean.

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