
Is huh a universal word? (2013) - bryanrasmussen
http://huh.ideophone.org/
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deanCommie
I moved from Russia to Canada as a kid and remember reading English-language
books and being really confused by the word "ouch".

I thought it would be really weird to say "ouch" when you accidentally stumble
or hurt yourself - it felt completely unnatural. It was fascinating that
different cultures have such different exclamations for pain!

Well it turns out that it's not the case. Humans all make roughly the same
sound when they stub their toe, it's just that different countries write it
down differently and think of it slightly differently.

I think "Huh" is similar. A "Confused grunt" noise is approximately similar in
most of the world, but different languages write it down differently.

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User23
What do ducks say in Russia? In America it's quack and in Germany it's kwak.

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dgellow
In French: coin coin :)

No idea how to explain the pronunciation though ...

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desdiv
IPA: /kwɛ̃.kwɛ̃/

Here's a French speaker pronouncing it: [https://youtu.be/Dtta-
mW6Pro?t=15](https://youtu.be/Dtta-mW6Pro?t=15)

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tokyodude
I must be skimming too much. They say "huh" is universal but point out Japan
(and apparently Korean) use "eh". "eh" != "huh", not even close nor is its
usage. Maybe these are are different but you can use "eh" to acknowledge you
heard. With a question inflection to point out you didn't hear.

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newsbinator
In Korean to "initiate repair" when you haven't heard quite well, typically
you'll say, "네" (i.e. "yes?").

Seems to be automatic. When people are mildly stunned, they'll often go "어"
(eoh).

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williamdclt
I find it to be automatic for a lot of people. I know several people that go
"mh?" (in english) or "hein?" (in french) when they perfectly understood what
you said. It's just a reflex, maybe to give themselves a bit more time to
think. It's a bit annoying, I often just wait a second and they start
answering

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Tor3
As a teenager I did that too, I always replied (the equivalent in my langague
of) "what?" to whatever was said. Just a reflex. Then my aunt pointed it out
to me, and I was able to stop doing that. Good thing.

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newsbinator
Ah that reminds me of when I was in school, and there was a girl who started
every answer with "Okay!...".

The teacher would ask, "What's the capital of X?", and she'd respond
confidently (and correctly), "Okay! The capital of X is Y."

Not sure if it was conscious on her part or not. I'm sure it came from the
spotlight, since she was otherwise "normal" (not that there necessarily is
such a thing).

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prmph
A bit OT, but here is another, probably related concept: What is the literal
meaning of "to understand" in your language?

In at least 3 three languages that I know (Twi & Ga, major languages in Ghana,
and English), the literal meaning evokes the sense of standing or sitting
under something. I wonder if it is the same in many other languages

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blattimwind
German: "verstehen" (an "odd" compound of ver+stehen, note that ver- doesn't
really carry meaning by itself and only exists as a prefix), which could be
understood as standing on/around(?) something. Then we have "begreifen" which
is a fairly direct equivalent of "to grasp".

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ObscureScience
There alot of those "are they necessary?" prefixes around. But isn't "ver" the
same as "for", which I imagine is the same as "pro" from latin. Meaning either
"before" or "causing" or "facilitating" or similar.

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blattimwind
No, not really. It is used in many, many words, with no obvious intrinsic
meaning of the prefix itself (and sometimes it's pretty much just redundant),
although some clusters of meaning can be made out (often ver- signifies
something negative or grave, for example).

verstehen, vergehen (active), vergehen (passive), verdammen, verabreden,
verfahren, verlaufen, verfestigen, verändern, verallgemeinern,
veranschaulichen, veranlassen (ver+an+lassen), verlassen, verärgern, verarmen,
verbiegen, verdrehen, ...

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ascar
I can't explain it well, but I somewhat have the feeling that "ver" also
mostly indicates an irrevocable change. All of the words you listed can be
used as a status for current conditions. The best example is probably
"versterben".

It's hard to grasp, but I think "ver" has some subliminal meaning. The "ver"
words feel different than their synonyms.

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ascar
Out of curiosity I looked it up and Duden actually has a page on it [1].

It can be broken down to 8 different cases according to Duden and there is
actually some logic behind it (though not the best and most consistent :D).

[1]
[https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/ver_](https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/ver_)

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knolax
The sound quality in the video was bad enough that I didn't recognize the
"huh" equivalents that I myself would use often.

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uranusjr
One thing to keep in mind is that while huh has an approximate between
languages, you might not be able to communicate the same intent across. One
such example occurs here in Taiwan. Native Taiwanese use _ha_ (different from
Mandarin), but this sound is used to provoke someone in Japanese. Gotta be
careful when you huh in a foreign country.

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fiblye
Japanese people definitely say "ha?" when they're confused.

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davidw
Not all sounds like that are.

In Italy, instead of saying "I don't know", you can say "boh?" with the oooo
sometimes drawn out. It's something you start to understand from the context,
but is by no means some kind of universal sound.

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meruru
>instead of saying "I don't know", you can say "boh?" with the oooo sometimes
drawn out.

In Japan, the equivalent is "sah" with the aaaa sometimes drawn out.

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tokyodude
I've never heard "sah" used for "I don't know". Sah is similar to "you know"
as in valley girl speak.

Hey, yesterday you know, I want to the mall you know, and there was this sale,
you know, it was totally cheap, you know, so I bought 3 pairs of shoes, you
know, aren't they great!?

In Japanese you can replace every "you know" with "sah".

You can put "sah" at the end of sentence when you don't know something or are
contemplating but I wouldn't translate it in that case as "I don't know".
Rather more like "Hmmmm...." as in "I wonder" like the feeling this emoji is
trying to express
[https://www.google.com/search?q=hmmm+emoji](https://www.google.com/search?q=hmmm+emoji)

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level3
You must be thinking of さ instead of さあ. The latter is often used to express
"I don't know" or "who knows".

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tomxor
I've noticed my partner when speaking in her dialect uses "uh"/"ah" a lot -
which sounds pretty much like "huh" and even without understanding most of the
words it's pretty clear this is the meaning in a conversation.

I think this sound is probably more common in languages that lack a collection
of more elaborate and synonymously used words for this purpose such as in
English with ["what", "pardon", "sorry", "excuse me"]. Perhaps English is
actually the outlier here.

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justtopost
Oddly, i seem to only hear extended uhmmms in english. I am sure there is a
spoken word frequency database we could compare, or create somewhat easily
scraping captions. Seems like a good project.

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tomxor
> Oddly, i seem to only hear extended uhmmms in english.

hah, but doesn't that have a different meaning? as in "i'm thinking" not "i
didn't hear you etc".

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packet_nerd
They only studied 10 languages. That doesn't seem like enough to call it
"universal".

What about those African languages made up of all clicking sounds?

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jmalicki
They studied 31 languages. One of the languages studied is ≠Akhoe Hai//om,
which is a click language. It was not one of the 10 studied in deeper detail,
but they found huh there.

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titanix2
Still, studying only 31 languages and argue that something is universal is
dumb as heck. Given there are 6000 of them safer approach would be the search
for almost universal or widely distributed phenomena.

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adrianN
If those 31 languages cover >90% of all humans I think making claims about
universality is reasonably justified.

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packet_nerd
If the claim is that the majority of humans speak a language which includes
huh? as a feature, then sure. But that doesn't seem very interesting
scientifically...

By calling it a universal word, I guess I thought they were referring to the
concept of linguistic universals [1], which are interesting since they might
suggest something about the deeper way in which our brains work. To make a
claim about linguistic universals like that I really think they should study
more than 10 (31) languages.

According to this page [2], 44% of people speak an Indo-European language, and
96% speak a member of one of the top 10 language families. The remaining 4%
includes 84 language families. I imagine there's a ton of variety there, and
for understanding human language and cognition they all probably have just as
much value as the larger language families.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal)

[2]
[https://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_families_statis...](https://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_families_statistics1.htm)

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neeleshs
In many parts of India India its "aaan?", Or sometimes just a nasalized
"hmmm?"

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HenrikB
Related: shh (request for silence) is a word and I think it's universal

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theemathas
There's no similar word in Thai.

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_emacsomancer_
Sounds awfully like the Hindi word for 'yes'.

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rahuldottech
Nup, that's different.

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_emacsomancer_
Ok, the Hindi one has a long vowel and it's nasalised, but still.

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kranner
Not even close.

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ph0rque
What would the http code be for "huh?"

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astura
400 (Bad Request)

>The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax.
The client SHOULD NOT repeat the request without modifications.

Some APIs use it for the case when the client passes in invalid data.

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dominotw
never heard of that till i moved to usa

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ytninja
me Japanese use "huh?" with anger when i cant understand his word of meaning

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apatters
Thai people will say "Ow?!" to express confusion/surprise, so I guess it's not
quite universal.

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nkkollaw
Not in Italy nor Poland.

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reshie
would make sense also like a natural gruntish with expresses something. mah or
ma is another one and a lot of times the first word which has had quite a bit
of study in of itself.

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wyattpeak
They address in the article why they believe it to be linguistic, and not a
mere grunt.

