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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
by asiachick 5y ago
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"
- anyfoo 5y agoGermans say "hah?", too. Or at least the Bavarians do.
- alar44 5y agoWisconsin checking in, lots of people say ha? here.
- mcntsh 5y agoIn German it's more like "hä?"
- anyfoo 5y agoThat's why I clarified "Bavarian", it's really very "hah" there instead of "häh".
- leonry 5y agoHm, 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-und-gefühlte-unhöflichkeit-von-was-denn-im-vergleich-zu-was-un https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/4876/verbreitung-...
- freddie_mercury 5y agoYour 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?"
- asiachick 5y agoFrom 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"
- getoj 5y agoThat’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.
- asiachick 5y agodon't agree that e is huh. e is often eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee but huh is never extended. Further, e is used for confirmation unlike huh
- harpersealtako 5y agoWe'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?"