是什么使得huh变成“通用词”？

何航

Listen to one end of a phone conversation, and you’ll probably hear a rattle of ah’s, um’s and mm-hm’s. Our speech is brimming with these fillers, yet linguistic researchers haven’t paid much attention to them until now. New research by Mark Dingemanse and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, has uncovered a surprisingly important role for an interjection long dismissed as one of language’s second-class citizens: the humble huh?, a sort of voiced question mark slipped in when you don’t understand something. In fact, they’ve found, huh? is a "universal word", the first studied by modern linguists.

在电话交流中，你可能会听到一连串ah、um、mm-hm的语气词。其实我们的语言中充满着这些词汇的填白，但直到现在，语言学者才开始关注它。荷兰奈梅根市的马普语言心理学研究所的马克▪丁格曼斯(Mark Dingemanse)和他的同事新研究发现，原本被贬为“二等公民”的不起眼的"huh?"，在语言中一直扮演着重要的角色，当你不理解某些事物时，"huh?"就不知不觉地从你嘴里蹦了出来。事实上，他们发现"huh?"是现代语言学者第一个研究的“通用词”。

Dingemanse’s team analyzed recordings of people speaking ten different languages, including Spanish, Chinese and Icelandic, as well as indigenous languages from Ecuador, Australia and Ghana. Not only did all of the languages have a word intended to initiate a quick clarification, but its form always resembled huh? The utterance, they argue, isn’t a mere grunt of stupefaction but a remarkable linguistic invention.

丁格曼斯的团队分析了包括西班牙语、汉语、冰岛语以及厄瓜多尔、澳大利亚和加纳土著语在内的十种不同语言的使用记录。不仅所有语言都有一个词倾向于发起一个简短声明，而且它的形式都类似于"huh?"他们认为，这个词不只是一个麻木状态下的咕哝，而是一个非凡的语言学发明。

In each of the languages investigated, the vowel is produced with a relatively relaxed tongue (never a vowel that requires you to lift your tongue, like "ee",or pull the tongue back, like "oo"). And if any sound comes before the vowel, it is either an "h" sound or what’s called a glottal stop, a consonant sound formed by a complete closure of the glottis, the thin space between the vocal folds. (You use a glottal stop between the two parts of "uh oh" or the two syllables of "better", if you say it with an extreme cockney accent.)

在每种语言研究中，元音的产生伴随着一个相对放松的舌位(没有一个元音是需要你像发 ee 音时需要抬高舌位，或者像发 oo 音时需要把舌头往后拉)。而且如果有任何音出现在元音前，它要么是 h 音，要么是所谓的声门闭塞音形成的辅音。(如果你用纯正的英语发音，那么你会在uh oh 的两部分间或者 better 的两个音节间用到声门闭塞音。)

It’s not unusual, of course, for languages to have words or sounds in common: The English "number" and Spanish numero, for instance, share a Latin ancestor. And languages may adopt words from other languages (which is how words such as the slang OK spread widely). But it’s a basic linguistic principle that when there is no shared origin or word swapping, the word for a given thing will be arbitrarily different in different languages: So there’s "house" in English, maison (French), fángzi (Chinese) and huan (Lao).

当然，这种情况在有相同单词或发音的语言中并不罕见，比如英语的 number 和西班牙语 numero 有共同的拉丁语渊源。而且语言可能会吸收其他语言的词汇(俚语OK就是这样传播的)。但有一个基本的语言学原则，如果没有共同的语言渊源或者替换词，对既定的事物会随意以不同的词出现：所以英语中叫 house;  法语中叫maison;  汉语中叫房子以及老挝语叫huan.

Huh? appears to be anything but arbitrary. Dingemanse’s team has already confirmed the similarities with speech transcripts from 21 additional languages, many of them unrelated. Are the researchers sure that huh? will turn up in every language in the world? "No", Dingemanse says. "But we are ready to place bets."

Huh? 的出现可以是任何情况，但一定不是随意出现的。丁格曼斯的团队已经从21种完全无关的语言中确认了相关性。研究者们真的确认"huh?"会在世界上每种语言中出现吗？“不，”丁格曼斯这个回答道，“但我们准备押这个注。”

What makes huh a word—and not, alternatively, the equivalent of a yelp? A laugh, cry or growl, however meaningful, isn’t considered language; even a dog communicates sadness with a whimper. A true word is learned, and follows certain linguistic rules, depending on the language spoken. Huh? fits this definition: For one thing, huh has no counterpart in the animal kingdom; for another, unlike innate vocalizations, children don’t use it until they start speaking. Moreover, in Russian, which doesn’t have an "h" sound, huh? sounds more like ah? In languages using a falling intonation for questions, like Icelandic, huh? also falls. All in all, Dingemanse concludes that huh? is a bona fide word with a specific purpose "crucial to our everyday language."

何航

是什么成就了huh,  而不是 yelp 的等价替换？一声笑、哭或者咆哮，不管它多么有意义，也都不会被认为是语言；尽管一只狗是用呜咽来传递悲伤的。一个依赖于口语的真正的词汇，是被习得并遵循确定的语言学规则。"Huh?"符合这个定义：其一，huh 在动物王国没有对应物；其二，不同于天赋的发声，儿童直到开始学说话才开始使用这个词。此外，在俄语中没有 h 音，"huh?"听起来更像是"ah?"。在提问时使用下降调的语言中，比如冰岛语，"huh?"也是下降调的。综上所述，丁格曼斯总结出"huh?"是一个“对日用语言很重要”的有特定目的的真正词汇。

But why would huh? sound similar in every language? To explain that, Dingemanse draws on evolutionary theory, saying the word is the result of "selective pressures in its conversational environment." In a sense, huh? is such a highly efficient utterance for serving its particular narrow function that it has emerged in different languages independently again and again—what’s known as convergent evolution, or the appearance of a feature in different, often unrelated organisms presumably because it works so well. Sharks and dolphins, Dinge­manse says, "arrived at the same body plan not because they share certain genes, but because they share an environment."

但为什么各种语言里"huh?"听起来那么像？为了解释这点，丁格曼斯引用了一个进化理论，该理论认为词汇是“在语言环境中选择性压力”的结果。某种意义上，"huh?"在完成其特定功能方面是个如此高效的词，以至于它在不同语言上一次次单独出现——这就是大家熟知的趋同进化，换言之，一种特性在不同且无关的有机个体中出现是因为这个特性能起效。丁格曼斯说，鲨鱼和海豚拥有相似的躯体构造并不是因为它们有相同的基因，而是因为他们生活在同一个环境中。

The dynamic, often fraught environment of human conversation, in which grave misunderstanding or a hurt feeling or an embarrassing gaffe is never more than a syllable away, calls for a word that instantly signals a need for clarification, is as brief as possible and is easy to produce, without complicated tongue coordination or lip movement. Without much planning—no searching one’s memory for the “right” word—a listener can interject a sleek, streamlined, wonderfully unambiguous word to keep the dialogue going. Huh?

人类复杂的对话环境中，充满着诸多误解、伤害感、抑或是一个尴尬的失礼，它们往往都是一言难尽的，而这种情况的存在恰恰需要一个词来表达对澄清的需要，而这个词越简洁、越容易发声、越没有复杂的舌、唇联动越好。不用太多计划，也不用从脑海里搜寻所谓“对的”词，听者就能通过一个简单却清晰、精准的词来表达感叹，而且还能维持对话的继续。"Huh?"

Other interjections probably play a similar role, greasing the wheels of conversation, and they too may turn out to be universal. We won’t know for sure until linguists take a listen.

其他的感叹语可能也扮演着相似的润滑对话的角色，而且也可能变成通用的。不过这得等到语言学家关注它们时，我们才会知晓。

What we do know is that huh? has a rightful place in dialogue. And it has the added virtue of being nonthreatening. In that sense it definitely beats what?

但我们敢肯定的是，"huh?"在对话中屡试不爽。而且它还有使说话者显得亲和的作用。从这个意义上看，它完爆了"what?".

何航

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