Do you ever wonder if the reason that different cultures have such wildly different onomatopoeias for the noise a cat makes is that cats have regional accents?
Actually, they do.
There’s a lot of evidence that animals have regional accents. Both birds and sperm whales in fact to vocalise differently depending on where they grew up.
As for felines themselves, there’s an ongoing study underway on at Lund University precisely about this.
As a phonologist who has watched entirely too many cat videos on the internet, I can confirm that cats of differing countries do have differentiated accents in their cries. Felines in England tend to have shorter, lower “mow” whereas Japanese cats do tend to make glides into high vowels, and are sustained longer, such as the ubiqutous use of “nyaaaan” in Japanese onomatopoeia.
As a linguist, I can affirm that the sounds produced for communication are determined every bit as much by anatomical features as they are by communicative experience.
Has anyone ever taken a look at cats’ body sizes and shapes, especially in the face and throat? Especially the width of the throat, the length of the nose, depth of the chest, and size of the jaws and mouth.
Look at all these face, chest, and throat shapes. That alone would indicate differences in their sounds.
What I really want to see is comparing maine coons bred in different countries and raised by litters from different regions being compared, or cats with the same size/shape (to cover anatomical inconsistencies) being compared, even across a continent.
But the tricky thing is, even cats from the same place have different voices and preferred “syllables” they’ll sustain, or how rapidly they call, or for how long.
Does anyone know who that study (re: cat accents) is being conducted by? I can’t find any mentions of that one, specifically… (All the Google results I’m getting are about what certain cat noises mean, or the big debate on ‘do cats have a special language for humans/dogs/other cats’, ‘what noises do cats make we can’t hear’, etc… I can’t find a study or article on the accent thing.)
The next long awaited post in the Fantasy Biology series, finally looking at the popular pegasus thanks to popular opinion on my Patreon.
Long time followers of this blog have been waiting for this one for a while. You all seem very keen for my take on how to make a six-limbed creature work, get airborne, and ideally be ridden.
There is a lot to talk about with these flying horses. In the interest of narrowing the topic, I’m only going to discuss pegasus with bird wings, not with bat/dragon wings or any other magical flying horses.
Key features of a pegasus:
Horse body
Bird wings
Can fly
Ridden by heroes
The biggest difficulty with making a pegasus ‘work’ is that you have two different types of forelimbs, that both use very different shoulder joints to function. A horse shoulder moves forward to back when running….
But a bird shoulder moves up and down with some rotation when flapping…
The oldest person alive was born on April 19, 1897, meaning that April 18th, 1897 was approximately the last time the Earth was inhabited by an entirely different set of people and if you don’t think that’s the realest shit ever then you can get right on outta town.
Super cute, although I think this is a marine species of hermit crab – they can tolerate being out of the water for short periods, but it’s stressful for them because once their gills dry out they’ll start suffocating.
I will forever love how perfectly hermit crab claws make a door to close the end of a well-fitting shell.
If I may- I believe that’s an Ecuadorian or similar species of land hermit crab, who are perfectly okay with going on land (as long as its humid)! It’s got the oval eyes, coloring, and sitting posture of an Ecuadorian but such a short video makes it hard to tell. I know somewhere else there is a longer clip of the same thing but I can’t seem to find it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about compassion in Judaism, and being kind. In that light, I would like everyone to know that my current favorite Jewish supernatural headcanon is that, instead of driving vampires away with crosses or stakes through the heart, we say the Mourner’s Kaddish for them. I mean, that’s just so adorable. You see this threatening undead creature, and instead of yelling murder, you feel bad for them, and you mourn for them. Imagine being a vampire at the receiving end of that, having been chased away for years and years and told you’re a monster when you come across someone who sees you and your existence and accepts that you’re in a pretty bad place and offers help in the best way they can. I’m actually tearing up about this a little. If someone adds to this post I’ll love them forever.
It doesn’t work for zombies.
This is one of the hardest things she learns, in the business. Saying the Mourner’s Kaddish will slow a vampire, to stare at you with wide shocked eyes (and once, memorably, to weep blood-tinged tears), unable or unwilling to lift a hand against you. It will calm a dybbuk, enough to make it stop whatever destruction it’s begun, and almost always enough to start a conversation about why it clings so desperately to the world of the living, what it’s left undone, how it can be freed to move on. You have died, the Kaddish says, and we mourn you as we would mourn our own dead, because someone must.
But there is no soul and no mind left in a zombie, no vestige of the self it once was, nothing left for the Kaddish to speak to.
She says it anyway, with every head-shot, with every flung grenade.
Not because she still hopes one might hear her, but because they are dead, and the dead should be mourned.
Steel Phoenix Studios 
