Woof woof bow wow yap yap

What do you say dogs say? Zach is making up words at the moment - I love his adjective 'scokerly' for a towel that hadn't been dried in the drier and had gone crispy. Crispy is not a good word for it - scokerly is a great one. So how do we make up words? This article suggests that our perception of sounds produced by animals around us plays a part, and our preference for particular sounds (and then spellings) influences how these come about (when you are not adapting existing morphemes). So dogs (cats, cockerels...) in other parts of the world may sound very similar to dogs in English-speaking countries and yet the words chosen to approximate that sound may appear quite different.