It is used in place of "what? It is the rude rude version of "what"? Or "what do you mean? Or "I'm sorry could you repeat that? Can it be used to make it sound friendly or casual? And thank you for answering. Doloresss It depends on who you are talking to, and where you are.
The sensory cortex receives the sound signals before the cerebral cortex. Meanwhile the cerebral cortex is figuring it out just as you ask for clarification and you immediately come up with the answer. I do the same thing all the time! I really think I did not hear the person, it takes a second or two, and I figure it out I guess… I never went as far as trying to explain it scientifically! I just think we are not paying enough attention! I do it when I hear but cannot immediately understand what the person has asked.
I have found that I keep a literal recording of the last several seconds of sounds in my brain and can replay them at will. By doing this, I am often able to decode what the person asked by replaying this recording and listening to it carefully a second time.
At least this is how I believe I do it. I think Carine and Shagnasty are right. But your brain keeps trying to solve the puzzle and does so before the other person can give you said clarification.
Me: What colour is that car? Me: And what about that one? All this happens with split-second precision every time we have a casual conversation. Astonishingly, this remains constant across cultures, regions and languages. Researchers from varied disciplines have long studied the functioning of language and the properties of the human brain that have made it possible.
The focus, however, has primarily been on the rules of grammar, the formal structure of sentences and the neurological mappings of the brain as it processes language. It also appears once every 84 seconds in a conversation. One needs to bear in mind that the delays in question here are and milliseconds respectively. For those uninitiated in the study of linguistics, it can be hard to register the significance of a millisecond-long pause in a conversation.
However, if one looks beyond all the experiments and the trivia, what really stays with the reader is the sense of deep compassion with which Enfield approaches and discusses the inner workings of conversations and the underlying reasons for the evolution of language.
We help each other, where necessary and possible, to stay on track in conversation. This word is used to express confusion in 31 languages from 16 language families, pointing to the likelihood that the word is universal. Members of our research team initially saw the possibility that Huh?
We were focused on how people deal with misunderstandings in language. In a preliminary phase of group research, we were struck by a repeated observation.
In all the languages for which we had data, people were saying something that sounds pretty much like English Huh? This observation led us to ask: Could Huh?
To really know for sure whether Huh? The linguist Anna Wierzbicka of the Australian National University argues that a small set of around 60 word meanings are universal.
Every language, she says, has a clear way to express simple concepts including good , all , people , and you. The linguist Robert M. Dixon of James Cook University argues that every language has adjectives, a class of words that are distinct from nouns and verbs.
And the linguist Noam Chomsky of the University of Arizona argues that recursion —taking the output of a process and using it as input for the same process again—is found in the grammatical structure of all languages.
But they still are able to state that something is highly likely to be universal, as long as no counterexamples have so far been found. This practice is accepted because linguistics is an inductive science. That said, they must always be open to finding new information that disproves their claims. The words in columns 1 and 2 can be used to express confusion and initiate conversation repair the process of correcting a misunderstanding. Words meaning what or how , shown in column 1, differ from language to language.
But the short syllables in column 2 have remarkably similar pronunciation across language families. The table above shows weak repair initiators in 15 languages— nonspecific words used to indicate a problem of understanding strong repair initiators , such as who , where , and when , are more specific.
All the words in both columns 1 and 2 can be used for the same general function as Huh? The words in column 1 are all questioning words that mostly mean what , or sometimes words that mean how can be used for this function, as in the optional forms in Italian Come?
These words sound completely different across languages: Compare what in English, shto in Russian, and aki in Duna a language of highland Papua New Guinea. These wide-ranging sounds are what we expect to find when we compare words from different languages: For example, the words for dog in the same three languages are: English dog , Russian sobaka , and Duna yawi.
In column 2 of the table, something different is going on. There is an uncanny resemblance between these words. All spoken languages use vowel sounds. They each draw on the same human set of possibilities. In linguistics, the possibilities for vowel sounds in human languages are laid out on a grid with two axes: front-to-back and close-to-open see the figure below. Each phonetic symbol on the chart represents a vowel sound that is used in at least one human language.
All spoken languages use vowel sounds, which linguists track by plotting on charts like the one above using the IPA. For closed vowel sounds for example IPA i , as in meet , the tongue is positioned near the roof of the mouth, whereas for open vowel sounds for example IPA a , as in hot the tongue is as far as possible from the roof of the mouth.
Similarly, front and back vowel sounds refer to the position of the tip of the tongue near the front or back of the mouth. In all 31 languages the authors studied, the word Huh? The what words in column 1 of the table above use vowel sounds from all over this chart. But our observation of 31 languages showed that in the expressions corresponding to Huh?
We isolated examples of the single word Huh? The local version of Huh? It is a real word, not a grunt. All of the Huh?
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