Which of these two shapes is called bouba?
Draw a round, blobby shape and a spiky, jagged one. Tell somebody that one is called bouba and the other kiki, and ask which is which. Around nine people in ten give the same answer, and they give it whether they speak English, Tamil, Swahili or nothing much at all yet — two-year-olds do it too.
So the sounds of words are not entirely arbitrary. Some noises feel round and some feel sharp, and every language quietly exploits it. BUZZ and HISS and SQUEAK are the obvious version of the same effect: the word is doing an impression of the thing it names.
Animals sound much the same everywhere; the writing-down is where countries part company. An English rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo. A French one says cocorico, a German kikeriki, a Japanese kokekokko, a Turkish ü-ürü-üüü.
Look past the consonants and there is a pattern. Almost every version has three or four syllables with the stress in the same place, because that part is the actual bird. What differs is which sounds each language has available to build it from — the same reason an English dog says WOOF and a Japanese one says wan-wan.
Tu-whit tu-whoo is two owls, and a baa is a name
The famous British owl call is a duet, not a solo. The female tawny owl makes the sharp ke-wick, and the male answers with the long wavering hoo-hoo-oo. Hearing both means hearing a pair calling across a wood to each other.
Shakespeare wrote it as one bird in Love's Labour's Lost and the country has repeated the mistake ever since. Useful on a dark walk: a single HOOT is one owl talking to itself, and a call and answer is a pair checking their territory is where they left it.
In a field of two hundred sheep making what sounds like one continuous BAA, mothers and lambs find each other by voice. Ewes learn a lamb's call within a day or two of birth, lambs learn their mother's, and both can pick it out of the racket at a distance of many metres.
The same goes for a good deal of the rest of this grid. A MOO, a NEIGH, a CLUCK and a QUACK all carry more information than the spelling suggests — who is calling, how big they are, and whether they are content, hungry or alarmed. Farmers pick all that up long before they could explain how.
The easiest words on the whole site
The farmyard is well covered: MOO, BAA, OINK, QUACK, CLUCK and NEIGH. The house supplies WOOF, BARK, MEOW, PURR and HISS. From further afield come ROAR, GROWL, HOWL, SNORT, BUZZ, TWEET, HOOT, CROAK and SQUEAK.
For a child at the very start of reading this is an unusually kind list. The words are short, they are spelled almost exactly as they sound, and every one of them is an instruction to make a noise. Finding CROAK in the grid and then simply reading it out is about as close to instant success as early reading gets.