"Huh?"

       "Huh" is not just a palindromic gasp.  It's apparently a pretty universal, quick conversational word to express failure to understand something.  Speakers of many languages offer up a very similar sound under the same circumstances, linguistic investigators have discovered.

       They found that in all ten disparate languages they researched, the sounds were single syllables, there were a lot of low vowels like "ah" and "eh" and "uh," the word always started with a [h] or a glottal stop (the sound in the middle of English "uh-oh").

       Mark Pagel, who studies language evolution, says "huh" has undoubtedly been invented independently many times over because its brevity and ease of utterance answer a constant conversational need.

       A news article reporting on these findings by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands can be read here.