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They must have missed Swedish. We don't have 'huh', we have 'va'.
by GreenHeuristics 6y ago
They must have missed Swedish. We don't have 'huh', we have 'va'.
- Zitrax 6y agoI was thinking the same, I haven't heard 'huh' in Sweden, and 'va' doesn't sound much like it. I also read in the source: "Therefore we collected data from recordings of naturally occurring informal conversations in a sample of 10 languages from 5 continents, varying fundamentally in terms of phonology, word structure, and grammar (languages 1–10 in Figure 1)". That sounds pretty far from "all languages" as in the title.
- mkagenius 6y agoThat's really weird. So, all languages do not have word for say 'water' ? or say 'father' ?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 6y agoGreeks have "e?".
- ejolto 6y agoLook at the table, non of the words are literally "huh", but they convey the same meaning. The title is confusing, I had the same thought as you at first.
- flurdy 6y agoYeah the table has an Icelandic example: "Ha". Though I only lived in Sweden for a year so I can't remember but Norwegian has the word "Hæ" which certainly has the same meaning as the English "huh"
- hashmush 6y agoVasaru? I don't think the point is that it would sound like "huh" in all languages, but rather that there is a word used like "huh" in all languages. "Va" definitely fits, as you even said "we have 'va'", proving the point of the article.