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.
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...
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?'
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.
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"
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 :)
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: ՜
According to Wikipedia, "linguists classify Armenian as an independent branch of the Indo-European language family" and "Armenian has its own unique script, the Armenian alphabet, invented in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots"[1].
As a Turkish citizen who lived on the other side of the border for 23 years, I was not aware that Armenian had such a unique script and grammar. Is it harder to learn than the Latin alphabet? I'm curious because we apparently switched to Latin script for writing Turkish from Arabic script just because of the steep learning curve (at least that's what they had thought us at school).
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.
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?.
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.