Onomatopoeia (words that sound like what they symbolize) doesn’t play a very large role in human languages. There are a few words that are onomatopoetic, such as the English hush, swish, or clink. One area, however, where all languages use onomatopoeia is animal noises. Humans always make up words for animal noises that are imitations of the actual sounds animals make.
Some humans are more successful in this than others, and it’s interesting to compare the words for animal sounds in different languages and see which ones are closest to what the animals actually sound like. It seems to me, for instance, that the Spanish word for “oink”–which is tru-tru–is closer to the noise pigs make than “oink” is.
In case you didn’t see it in a story I linked yesterday, there is an initiative called The Quack Project which records children attempting to represent the noises of different animals. They’re interesting to listen to. Often the kids are being too influenced by the word that they have been taught the animals say. Other times, though, they are quite close.
To me it seemed, for instance, that the kids who speak Cantonese has more actual experience with pigs than other kids. Both the Italian kids and the Columbian Spanish kids both had variants on “oink.” But the Cantonese were so dead-on that it’s almost impossible to spell their imitation (kkchhh! fff! is about as close as I can come).
Of course, a lot depends on how you inflect it. For example, in Russian the word for the sound that a sheep makes, similar to the English word, is “baa.” But the Chinese word is “mei,” which I happen to think actually sounds closer to the real sound. Of course, neither sounds very much like a sheep if you just say it like a regular word. But if you say it in a “sheep voice” it sounds much better.