system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why are animal sounds different in different languages? How did their spellings originate?
gpt
Different languages use different sets of sounds, and different ways of stringing sounds together, to make words. For example, the way an American would say the 'r' in "red" doesn't exist that way in Japanese. Another example, the way a Francophone would say the 'r' in "rouge" doesn't exist in English. 

The sounds that things make, such as animals, are described differently based on the sounds of the language being used. We think cats say "meow" because that makes sense by the standards of English. Japanese people think cats say "nyan" because that makes more sense when you're working from Japanese sounds. Nyan doesn't make as much sense in English, and meow doesn't make as much sense in Japanese.