The NewYork Times: by Jennifer Schuessler —
The Syllable Everyone Recognizes
Are there words that are universally understood, across all countries and cultures? A team of linguists has proposed one: “huh.”
Huh?
In a paper published on Friday in the journal PLOS One, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands announced that they had found strikingly similar versions in languages scattered across five continents, suggesting that “Huh?” is a universal word.
The study, conducted by Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, closely examined variations of the word— defined as “a simple syllable with a low-front central vowel, glottal onset consonant, if any, and questioning intonation” — in 10 languages, including Dutch, Icelandic, Mandarin Chinese, the West African Siwu and the Australian aboriginal Murrinh-Patha.
