The sound of a French bee, a cheerful "beeee-eeeep!," is the greeting at bzzzpeek.com, a Web site devoted to onomatopoeia. For anyone who does not know what onomatopoeia is, bzzzzpeek.com will gladly demonstrate. In fact, that's pretty much all the site does.Onomatopoetic words, "buzz," "beep" and "moo," for instance, mimic the action or object they represent. They are, in theory, international, part of a lingua franca. Cows after all, don't moo differently in Spain than in Japan, do they? And all donkeys hee-haw, don't they?
You have 29 chances to find out to what degree this is not so.
I share an office with someone, so I had to put on headphones to try out the site. It's hysterical. I never knew my oldest cat was Italian. And Japanese snakes apparently have vocal cords. They have sounds for other objects, too, and if your kid wants to put his/her renditions on the site, the submission process is straightforward.
Also, if you start playing a sound bite and then click on another one, it will start playing while the previous one is still going. Clicking on all the cats in rapid succession made me feel like I was filling food bowls at a very exotic intake center.
Posted by kswygert at June 7, 2005 01:15 PM