“Huh?” sounds kind of coarse in German, so that may be the reason but I hear plenty of it here in Austria.
Duh?
Duh.
D’oh!
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Quite unlike “Huch!”
Huh. What do ya know.
In Brazilian Portuguese, it sounds like “uhn”, and is sometimes written informally as “ãhn?”.
I speak Finnish as a second language. People I know tend to say “täh?” (short for “mitä?”, which means “what?”) more than “ha”. I’ve also heard “hä”. I also tend to say “öö” (pronounced sort of like “er”) in situations where I would use “um” in English.
Do the francophone Canadians say “hein?” ?
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.
Huh. Maybe this is best left to professionals?
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It’s “nei3ge4”, which literally means “which one”
Thanks! I’m going to forward the hell out of this link.
In English at least, I hear it get used (at least) two ways: With rising inflection: “Huh?” (A question: “What’s that?”) and flat or lowered inflection: “Huh” (A response:“Ah, so that’s how it is.”), where it also is similar to “hmm” and “uh-huh.”
Which, incidentally, you will hardly ever hear an Austrian say.
What? “Huh?” or “Huch?”
(Valid question, not Schmäh.)
“Huch?”
You´d rather hear that in parts of Germany.
need extra more information
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