Is “Huh?” a Universal Word?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0078273

by mbrubeck • 12 years ago

28 27 12 years ago

plosone.org

sssilver3• 12 years ago

Actually we have the exact same word in Armenian -- «Հը՞», with the exact same meaning

dubcanada• 12 years ago

How do you pronounce «Հը՞» ?

And «Հը՞» looks crazy btw...

sssilver3• 12 years ago

Հը is pronounced pretty much exactly as "Huh".

Հ = H

ը = the sound of the letter "i" in the words "birth" and "dirt".

՞ = ?; it is the Armenian question mark. Unlike Latin languages, the question mark is placed adjacent to the vowel it's meant to raise the pitch of. English equivalent would be look like this: "Hu?h"

egeozcan2• 12 years ago

We have "ha?" which is read very similar to huh and meaning the same thing, also in Turkish. This is getting interesting.

jerryhuang100• 12 years ago

Huh? should be "YO", eh?

wosos• 12 years ago

Huh?

tokenadult• 12 years ago

No, not really. The commentary on the Language Log blog about this 2013 article

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8369

shows that even the authors of the article admit that there is not the same phonetic form of this word in all major languages, much less all languages in the whole world.

mytochar2• 12 years ago

While that may be true, it is easy to see how they might have come from there, and it's easy to see how in multiple places around the world that "word" could come to mean the same thing all on its own.

"Huh?" is simply the onomatopoeia of a quick, burst of air across the neutral state of mouth, tongue and lips, maybe with the opening of one's mouth following it.

If someone didn't hear something, or if someone wanted to acknowledge their presence and attentiveness, what simpler way than making a quick sound, without even trying to define it in any direction. That sound happens to be what we call 'huh?' or 'hm?' or 'eh?'

belorn• 12 years ago

I think the part about quick and simple sound is the significant aspect to take away from this. In Swedish the word is "Va", which sounds very different from huh, but share the characteristic of being simple and short.

shittyanalogy2• 12 years ago

Neutral mouth state in your language. That distinction is kind of the point. It also begins with an aspiration which some languages do not have.

snogglethorpe• 12 years ago

Yeah, from what I remember the last time this paper showed up on HN, they didn't really claim "huh" was a universal word, just there was some vaguely similar equivalent in many languages.

That seems like a much weaker (and more believable) claim, but it probably doesn't make for good headlines...

elpachuco• 12 years ago

hm?

thewarrior• 12 years ago

In Malayalam we say something like aayh ?

aneeskA• 12 years ago

It is more like - eh!

yetihehe• 12 years ago

In Poland you can use "eee?" which is like "eh" without h, but it's very rarely used as "retransmit" word, I don't remember using it ever. The most common is "co?" meaning "what?". It sounds like "tso?" in english.

plumbzium• 12 years ago

hę?

huhrly• 12 years ago

Also see supplementary materials here: http://huh.ideophone.org/

shittyanalogy2• 12 years ago

The French do not say "huh".

jmt7les• 12 years ago

It seems more like the inflection which indicates a question is universal, not any specific word.

Torgo• 12 years ago

People used "eh?" when I was in Japan. I had to teach myself to use it rather than "huh?"

boyaka• 12 years ago

It's not as common but they do say "haa?" (sounding a lot like our "huh?") too. Another very common one besides "e?" is "n?", and also "are?" (more associated with "what?"). Also eeee? or nnnnn?.

Best online japanese-english resource imo: http://eow.alc.co.jp/search?q=huh&ref=sa

pessimizer• 12 years ago

The downvotes within this thread are bizarre.

Is “Huh?” a Universal Word?

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