Yeah-huh
September 11th, 2008In at least one Amazonian language, pitch conveys much of the meaning of an expression, which makes it possible to whistle anything you want to say. As a result, Pirahã speakers can with little effort hold whistled conversations with people whom they can’t see.
I found this idea fascinating and bizzare, but a little reflection turned up a few examples in English where most of the meaning is encoded in pitch. For example, if you say, “I don’t know’ without opening your mouth or moving your tongue (try it), the low-high-low pitch pattern alone conveys the meaning to other English speakers.
But not to speakers of other languages. When I first moved to France to study, I would occasionally, unconsciously substitute “uh-huh” and “huh-uh” for Yes and No. Because the “h” phoneme is not significant in French, French speakers who had not learned English had trouble differentiating the two grunts, and I had to unlearn them.
Yes = uh-huh, mm-hmm
No = huh-uh, nuh-uh, hm-mm (first “m” is actually a glottal stop)
If you add pitch to the mix, you can say “no way”: ”say” huh-uh, but extend the final uh and give it a falling tone.
All this is a long prelude to explain a linguistic discovery a friend and I made some time ago. German and French both have a word that is a combination of contradiction + assertion. In English, you need to use a circumlocution. An example should make it clear:
- You didn’t pay the telephone bill, did you?
- I did too.
In English you say, I did too, I did so, or Yes, I did, but in German you can say simply Doch (In French it is Si.) Why doesn’t English have a one word equivalent for contradicting people? It turns out that it does, but most people stop using it once they are out of their teens (if they ever use it at all). To the list of meaningful grunts in English, you can add yeah-huh (or yuh-huh), which means Yes, so. Pitch is expressive here as well: the more pitch variation you apply to the “huh” syllable, the more obviously wrong you imply your interlocutor is.