Bird, niǎo. (Sounds like, nyow.)
Like dog (goh) and book (sue), bird exchanges one short, simple sound for another: nyow.
It was a word I grasped quickly and used easily until I learned cow — nyoh — and suddenly my brain wanted to mix up the two. It’s a very humbling thing to realize, a beat too late, that one has pointed to the sky and told a toddler, “Look! A cow!”
I’ve since started thinking of nyoh more like nyohhhhh, with a drawn-out o at the end, mentally linking it to a cow’s moooo. Which actually works. Most of the time.
