Like "tut-tut" in the British English, which is supposed to mean a dental click and not literally saying /tʌt tʌt/.

Oh, and that thing in Swedish when they suck in air instead of saying "ja", which I think they spell "tjoo". Actually, would they write "tjoo" in a book? I don't know.


13 comments

  1. I can think of a single native case in Russian: the command for a horse to stop is a voiced bilabial trill: /ʙ:/, but since it’s not a phoneme in the Russian language proper, somehow everyone agreed to spell it “тпру”. Which causes some inexperienced, but literate riders to try and say /tpru/ to their steed.

  6. There’s “atchim” for a sneeze in Portuguese. And then there’s a few that are maybe a bit less universally accepted, such as “hum-hum” for clearing your throat or “cof cof” for a cough (shows up a lot in comics, probably inspired by English). “Ah” can be a gasp as well as an actual “ah”. There’s also “pfff” which can be the impatient blowing sound but I’m sure I’ve also seen it for the sort of fart-like sound that means “I don’t know” in Portugal and a few other countries.

  8. The only one I know is tuic-tuic pronounced like chuck-chuck. A call you make when calling hens over for food

  9. It’s called onomatopoeia in English (well, Greek actually), and yes Hungarian is full of them. We call them hangutánzó szó “sound-mimicking words”.

  10. *Köh* in Finnish is the sound of coughing. You can use it in writing to indicate an interrupting cough when you want to say something.

    *Kröhöm* is a longer version indicating clearing your throat with cough, and it’s even more intentional interruption.

  11. I thought this was taught at primary school worldwide, I’d be surprised that a written language doesn’t have onomatopoeias.

  13. I’m Norwegian and we do the air sucking thing. It’s not instead of saying ja, we ARE saying ja. We don’t spell it any other way than “ja”

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