Contributors

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Huh?

Linguists have found the first universal word, a word that is in every language spoken on earth.

Huh?

Yes, it's the word "huh?" The authors of the study published in PLOS One call it an "other-initiated repair," an element of language
in which one participant produces a turn at talk, the other then signals some trouble with this turn, and finally the first produces a next turn which aims to solve the trouble, usually by means of repetition and/or modification. In some languages the interjection, or an item similar to it, was also found in other sequential environments, for instance to mark surprise or to pursue a response.
The exact pronunciation of huh? varies somewhat from one language to another, much like the word "dog" might be pronounced "dawg" or "dowg" or "dahg" or "doug" or "doh-oog" in different parts of the world.

But still, the pronunciation of huh? is amazingly consistent: a single syllable, nasal, low front to middle vowel, never ending in a consonant. The intonation is rising in all languages except those  having a falling interrogative prosody (to keep it consistent with other question sentences).

Some people might argue that huh? isn't even a word. I might have agreed until a few years ago, when my sister suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and lost her ability to speak. She can now form words only with extreme difficulty, and after many successive repetitions, when the signals finally get from her brain to her throat, tongue and lips. And still it sounds like a rusted gate opening, clumsy and nothing like her original voice. She knows exactly what she's trying to say, but her injured brain simply cannot force the sounds out. Even with words as simple as yes and no.

But when she says huh? she sounds exactly like her old self, no hesitation or mispronunciation. That implies that huh? is part of a lower-level universal vocabulary.

This makes me wonder if there are other utterances that are part of this ur-vocabulary. After trying unsuccessfully to form a sentence, my sister sighs with frustration, just like anyone else might. Is the sigh of frustration universal? Laughter seems to be universal, though individual laugh "accents" differ greatly. How widely understood are "uh-uh" or "mm-mm" for no, and "uh-huh" or "mm-hmm" for yes?

In any case, this means that when someone blurts at you in a foreign language, responding with "huh?" will get the message across loud and clear.

No comments: