So why would so many completely unrelated languages settle on the same little interjection any time the listener wants information to be repeated? One of the linguistics researchers responsible for the study, Mark Dingemanse, seems to think it's due to convergent evolution -- the process by which multiple subjects accidentally evolve in similar ways.

Now, the easy objection here would be that "huh" isn't really a word, that it's just a noise we make. And don't we all share similar grunts and screams? After all, Japanese porn sounds just like American porn, once the fucking starts. But "huh" follows all of the other qualifications for word status. It's not used arbitrarily, and it does follow specific grammatical rules, like always appearing at the end of the sentence. It has a specific meaning that's understood by the listener ... no matter where you go.

Linguistics experts at Harvard University have painstakingly compiled a list of all the devil/animal-marriage sayings for when a sunshower occurs, though for some reason they have left out the beautiful idiom sandwich that France has come up with. Apparently, when caught in a downpour during a sunny day, a French person might turn to you and say that the devil's beating his wife and marrying his daughter (who is also a lemur, probably).

But even weirder, folks from different parts of the world would look up at constellations and unknowingly agree on what they were seeing. Take the Orion constellation, named after a giant from Greek mythology, or as the Syrians knew it, "Al Jabbar," literally meaning "the giant." Then there's the ever-popular Big Dipper, which even to people all across Asia looked so much like something that belongs in the kitchen, they gave it names like "the Ladle" (Malaysia) or "Northern Saucepan" (Japan and Korea).

GH5046/Wiki Commons
The lesson here: never do astronomy on an empty stomach.

It goes even further than that, though. The Big Dipper, as part of the Ursa Major constellation, has long been associated with the image of bears among such diverse people as ancient Greeks and various North American tribes, and no one can explain why. But whatever it was that made them look at the same stars and see majestic bears, they sure did not have that in Arabia, where some stories described the Big Dipper as a coffin followed by three mourners.

In other words, in different languages, it's not just the words that get replaced; the entire ideas are arranged differently, which makes sense, if these languages were developed at different times and places by people who never met each other. However, recent research has shown that when we rely solely upon gestures and pantomime, we basically speak the same, universal language.

Psychologists at the University of Chicago tested 40 native speakers of English, Mandarin, Turkish, and Spanish, asking them to describe a scene they saw in a video using only their hands. Now, of the four languages, only Turkish is a pure subject-object-verb language, but when the test subjects were asked to communicate a sentence like "the woman twists the knob," all of them used the gesture for twisting (the verb) at the end. This went completely against the grammatical rules of their native tongues, which of course wasn't present when they were describing the scene using words.

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Subjects who gestured with their own knobs were expelled from the study.

The results of the experiment seem to show that when you strip away the rules and regulations of language, the human brain, no matter your nationality or ethnic background, diverts to a default state that perceives reality as subject (first) then action (last). Or in other words: The human brain is totally like Yoda thinks.

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Evolution plays a strange game.

For a creature that has never existed, dragons sure do turn up a lot in ancient texts.

Almost every major civilization has had a love affair with a scaly, fake mythological creature, which is a) adorable, and b) intriguing as hell, in view of the fact that countries as diverse as Australia, Greece, Scotland, Italy, and Korea have independently told stories about these reptilian beasts.

For example, here's a Germanic dragon:

MicheletB/Wiki Commons
God, we hope he's just going for a high-five there ...

Welsh:

Gian Luca Ruggero/Wiki Commons
Now you know exactly one thing about Wales.

Greek:

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Don't forget to bury the teeth next to the petunias!

Japanese:

Hokusai
It doesn't technically breathe fire, but it invented the wasabi challenge.

You just need to take one look at them to realize that it's not like these guys spread on their own from a single source like an ancient word-of-mouth version of a cult movie. It seems that a lot of these tales and beliefs happened independently of each other, and there are many theories as to how it happened.

For instance, in Australia and Africa, huge monitor lizards and crocodiles are probably the source of the dragon myth, while the Asian dragon origin can probably be traced back to whale and dinosaur fossils. If you didn't have Wikipedia handy back then and just happened upon a whale bone that wasn't in the ocean, your mind could have naturally produced quite a tale to explain what the fuck you just found out in a field somewhere.

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And then you would imagine that they could fly because the human brain is AWESOME!

Another, more deep-seated explanation of the belief in giant, magical lizards throughout history and geography can be attributed to our innate fear of deadly predators. Back when we were just a bunch of primates swinging happily on tree branches, predators constituted roughly 80 percent of all living things under those branches. But as we got bigger and smarter and gun-inventing-er, not even lions seemed to tickle the fear center of our brain.

So to keep us vigilant and on our toes, the brain extrapolated from the animals and fossils around it, and came up with stories of huge, scaly beasts that could fly and breathe fire. That still seems ... strangely specific, doesn't it? But then again, every culture has zombies and werewolves, too, so maybe we were constantly thinking up different monsters, and over time we decided to all keep the same few really awesome ones.

Justin is building a horror novel that is free as the air you breathe. It's over on JukePop here. Vote to keep it going. He would also like to thank Brittney Herz-Glenn for her expertise on wordish things. Thanks to Christopher Kidonakis for the research on this, read more from him here.

For more things we should steal from other cultures, check out 9 Foreign Words the English Language Desperately Needs. And then check out 33 Useful Words the English Language Needs to Add.