
Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? - mbrubeck
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0078273
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tokenadult
No, not really. The commentary on the Language Log blog about this 2013
article

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

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mytochar
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?'

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shittyanalogy
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.

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mytochar
The mouth state I was referring to was closed. Are there people elsewhere that
normally hold their closed mouth in a :O position?

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

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dubcanada
How do you pronounce «Հը՞» ?

And «Հը՞» looks crazy btw...

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sssilver
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"

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ozh
I didn't imagine question marks (or exclamation marks too?) could be placed
anywhere but at the end of a sentence. The Armenian syntax makes a lot of
sense, I feel smarter to know this, than!ks :)

~~~
sssilver
Actually, yes.

Imagine saying "When, tomorrow?"

In most latin-based languages, you'd have only one question mark at the end,
although you raise your pitch twice (on "When", and on "tomorrow"). In
Armenian it would look like -- "Whe՞n, tomo՞rrow."

Exclamation mark follows the same logic, and looks like: ՜

"Hello!" = "Ողջո՜ւյն"

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pessimizer
The downvotes within this thread are bizarre.

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huhrly
Also see supplementary materials here:
[http://huh.ideophone.org/](http://huh.ideophone.org/)

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thewarrior
In Malayalam we say something like aayh ?

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yetihehe
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
hę?

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

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boyaka
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](http://eow.alc.co.jp/search?q=huh&ref=sa)

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jmt7les
It seems more like the inflection which indicates a question is universal, not
any specific word.

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shittyanalogy
The French do not say "huh".

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elpachuco
hm?

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wosos
Huh?

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jerryhuang100
Huh? should be "YO", eh?

