Made the characteristic cry of a sheep or goat, or spoke in a weak, complaining voice.
From Middle English bleten, from Old English blǽtan. Related to Dutch blaten. The onomatopoetic root mimics the actual sound sheep make, which has remained remarkably stable across Germanic languages for over a thousand years.
The word bleated is literally onomatopoeia—it sounds like what it describes! Linguists call these 'echoic words,' and they're found in almost every language, but they sound different depending on which language you speak in—which shows our brains hear the same animal sound through our own linguistic filter.
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