Hi @jackie31337,
But “(mi)tä” is an interrogative pronoun, with an entire implicit syntactic structure in tow, analogous to English “what”, which implies “what do you mean/did you say/the hell”. “Huh” (and Dutch “hè”, and presumably all the other items in the study, which I’ve only skimread) is an interjection. It could be that “hä” /hæ/ is a more common realization of Finnish , in which case my memory of life in Finland is failing me, which wouldn’t surprise me. I definitely have the spelling “ha” in mind though (my dictionaries are in transit), and Finnish orthography is fairly faithful to the phonetic situation.
The authors of the study even include Icelandic “ha”, and I lived there recently enough to know it’s a back vowel there, and the authors indeed chart it as such, or rather as a low central-back vowel if I understand their chart correctly. But then they say that “[i]n all languages investigated, it is a monosyllable with […] an unrounded low front central vowel,” which can’t be right.
