{"id":278950,"date":"2010-02-04T13:22:40","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T18:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2097"},"modified":"2010-02-04T13:22:40","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T18:22:40","slug":"huh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/278950","title":{"rendered":"Huh"},"content":{"rendered":"

I write this from gate 27 at SFO, on my way back to Philadelphia from a meeting<\/a> that was interesting and productive, but didn’t have a lot of direct linguistic relevance.\u00a0 I did manage to fit in breakfast with Geoff Nunberg and lunch with Paul Kay, and\u00a0 Paul pointed me to Andrea Baronchelli et al.,\u00a0 “Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns<\/a>“, PNAS 1\/25\/2010, which I’ll post about after I’ve had a chance to read it — in combination with Paul’s own recent paper, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, & Naveen Khetarpal, “Color naming and the shape of color space<\/a>“, Language<\/em> 85(4) 2009, which has been at the top of my to-blog list for a week or so.<\/p>\n

In the few minutes before my plane boards, I’ve got time to register one linguistic observation of possible interest:\u00a0 earlier this morning, as I was checking out of the place I’ve been staying, something happened that made me wonder whether American “huh” might be heading in the direction of Canadian “eh”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

I handed in my key and checked that the bill was paid, and at the end of the transaction, as I was leaving, the clerk said “Thanks, huh.”\u00a0 The (low falling) intonation was the same as he might have been expected to use with a vocative tag (e.g. “Thanks, man”).<\/p>\n

I’m used to Canadian “Thanks, eh” (see “The meaning of eh<\/a>“, 5\/1\/2005); and I suspect (without having a specific instance in mind) that many British speakers might be fine with “Thanks, innit”.\u00a0 But in my previous experience, the uses of “huh” include requests for clarification (“Huh? Sorry, I didn’t hear that.”), expressions of mild surprise (“Huh. That’s odd.”), or invitations to join in the expression of a presumably shared opinion (“Nice weather, huh.”) The latter two can have either rising or falling intonation.<\/p>\n

But I don’t believe that I’ve ever heard “Thanks, huh” before.<\/p>\n

Now, this was Berkeley, where everything from the flora <\/a>to the obituaries<\/a> reminds you that you’re not in Kansas anymore.\u00a0 But I’ve visited NoCal several times a year for the past few years, and if this kind of extension of “huh” is a local change in progress, then I’ve missed it.<\/p>\n

So maybe the clerk was a Canadian transplant, who noticed that “huh” was the American equivalent of “eh” in some contexts, and overgeneralized a bit.\u00a0 Or maybe this was just a random cultural mutation, a flash of noise in the linguistic meme pool.\u00a0 Either way, keep your ears open — “thanks, huh” may be coming to an interaction near you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I write this from gate 27 at SFO, on my way back to Philadelphia from a meeting that was interesting and productive, but didn’t have a lot of direct linguistic relevance.\u00a0 I did manage to fit in breakfast with Geoff Nunberg and lunch with Paul Kay, and\u00a0 Paul pointed me to Andrea Baronchelli et al.,\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}