Is “huh?” A universal word? The convergent evolution of linguistic items (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Is “huh?” A universal word? The convergent evolution of linguistic items (2013)

journals.plos.org

35 pointsbenbreen24 comments

A lot of the "nup" responses here are not philologists. Neither am I, but my understanding of this having read around a bit, is that words which we think are entirely different, can in fact be at root the same word, through a thousand years of branching.

Nuh, Huh, No/Ho/Pho/Bo could, in this model actually at root be "the same" in the way ma/mum/mama/moma/maman are. There is no rule which says a H sound can't be replaced by a PH or BH or GH or TH sound. It all depends.

I don't think the Japanese one is related to the finnish one btw. I am not arguing its one mother tongue. But, I wouldn't reject this hypothesis just because a german says Ha and an american says Huh

"Mama" is not really an universal word, it's mostly a western thing.

The letters seem to be universal though. E.g. for the father it's mostly b, p, t and for the mother m, n, w.

There are counter examples like Finnish. Isä for father and äiti for mother. Ofc, something like mama is here, but that is probably from Swedish.

Is huh a universal word? (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19126197 - Feb 2019 (86 comments)

Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10283498 - Sept 2015 (25 comments)

Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8450769 - Oct 2014 (27 comments)

This demo[1] show the relative height and forward/backness of vowel sounds from your mic. It's interesting to try and emulate some of these other Huh sounds. I wonder if anyone has looked into the inter language overlap these "repair initiator signals". For instance I often instinctual find the AA sound from Japanese speakers to sound a bit rude to my ears, even though I know it's not.

[1]https://byu-odh.github.io/apeworm/

Not to counter the research in the paper, but growing up in Brooklyn we used "נו" or "מה" ("nu" or "mah"). Sometimes today I'll say that to in California to people who don't understand -- and reply with "huh!?"

For laughs:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Huh, this could actually be a good query for relative frequency normalization. I had been searching for a way to display trends in a way that doesn’t just reflect overall content volume, without a good way to get a number for overall query volume for a period. https://jacksonkearl.github.io/HackerTrends/?query=“Huh”&fro...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

The difference between a sample over a period and a Zipf distribution can be useful in determining relative differences in query frequency.

It occurred to me, after reading the comments, how strange it is to then write out "huh" in text-based conversation.

Is this about the spoken word "huh" or about the humming noise with a questioning pitch?

Huh?

No, it is not. Never heard a Japanese person say "Huh?". They say "Ha?". Similar but not the same and used less often the English "Huh?" It's usually only used in a kind of extreme shock situation where as "Huh?" in English, or at least USA English, is way more common.

English

a) "Hello"

b) "huh?" (meaning I didn't hear you)

a) "I just said Hello"

Japanese

a) "I went to buy a car but I bought a camel"

b) "HA?" (WTF?)

a) "Yea, seriously. It drinks lots of water"

Germans say "hah?", too. Or at least the Bavarians do.

Wisconsin checking in, lots of people say ha? here.

In German it's more like "hä?"

That's why I clarified "Bavarian", it's really very "hah" there instead of "häh".

Hm, I would use „hä?“ rather to signal that I don‘t understand the content. I may well have understood the words or sentences, though.

On the other hand „huh?“ is meant in the paper rather for signaling that I didn’t understood the form, AFAIU. For that I would rather use „Was?“ or „Hm?“ in a slightly higher voice, like the German instance at point 25. in Figure 1 suggest.

As a sidenote, I wonder if the examples in the paper are acceptable in semi-formal conversations, say when talking to colleagues at work. In German I would rather stick with „Wie bitte?“ to avoid judgements like in the answers under https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/4876/verbreitung-...

Your comment doesn't even engage with the article's premise. You are attacking a strawman. They specifically mention the Japanese version of other-initiated repair and it isn't "Ha?"

From the abstract

> A word like Huh?–used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said– is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe. We investigate it in naturally occurring conversations in ten languages and present evidence and

Japanese don't use it for when "one has not clearly heard what someone just said"

> Huh? is a universal word not because it is innate but because it is shaped by selective pressures in an interactional environment that all languages share: that of other-initiated repair.

No, that is not how it's used in Japanese. They do not use "Ha" for "other-initiated repair"

That’s your parent’s point; the article states that the Japanese other-initiated repair word is “e”, which it is.

The article argues convincingly that “e” is “huh”-like, defining that as having an unrounded mid-front vowel with a glottal onset (or no onset).

Interestingly, in addition to “e” and “ha”, Japanese also has “hai” with a rising intonation, which is a more polite “e?” - all of these are “huh”-like.

don't agree that e is huh. e is often eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee but huh is never extended. Further, e is used for confirmation unlike huh

We're talking about "e" as it is used as an open other-initiated repair, the fact that it has a dozen other usages is irrelevant here. "E" (and sometimes "a", though I believe that might be regional and more context-dependent) is definitely used as an open other-initiated repair word in Japanese, meaning they can be used in the place of "huh" in the following dialogue pattern:

"Hey, what time is it?"

"Huh?"

"I said, what time is it?"

>>We have presented evidence and arguments that huh?, or more precisely a short questioning interjection with the function of other-initiation of repair, is a universal word likely to be attested in similar form in all natural spoken languages

Since they used word "likely", then the whole article does not mean, that huh applies to every language. They also used "more precisely a short questioning interjection with the function of other-initiation of repair" - and that is more closer to truth, as such questioning interjection might be present in all languages. But it hardly represents topic of huh.

Only because of logic used in conclusion, I can dare to say with absolute truth that: "Earth is flat, or more precisely - it is not round as ball". You can just marvel when scientists became lawyers and when science died because of that type of language.

PS With exception to English, other 2 languages that I use as native user do not have any equivalent of huh? at all. Unless it is what?, as a shortened form of question - what did you said?, but it is hardly a candidate to huh? unless we are really stretching the argument to include everything else. With that argumentation we can stretch even mouse onto a elephant.

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