Is “Huh?” a Universal Word?
plosone.org
plosone.org
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.
"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?'
That seems like a much weaker (and more believable) claim, but it probably doesn't make for good headlines...
And «Հը՞» looks crazy btw...
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"
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"
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).
Best online japanese-english resource imo: http://eow.alc.co.jp/search?q=huh&ref=sa