Of Sounds and Languages

Torill Mortensen in a Wednesday, January 25, 2006 entry "Returning Home" on the blog thinking with my fingers writes

I feel homesick for a language that touches me in a different manner, a longing towards harsh consonants, clear vowels and words that bring to mind a wiser range of meanings.

I am reminded how differently animal sounds are represented across languages and I am led to wonder about the Basho haiku devoted to the sound of the encounter between frog and pond.

glonk
Basho's frog
gone

I find it amusing that the syntactic resources of some languages permit a sort of reversal:

gone
Basho's frog
glonk

An interesting discovery I would not have found without a detour nostalgia. Keen, now, to discover the sounds of other versions rendered in other languages.

And so for day 401
18.01.2008