Is it a word even? What I mean is, is it a culturally universal sentiment? What other ways are there of telling people “Quiet!”?
Is the finger held over lips culturally universal?
I know we use it in dutch…
It works just the same in Spanish.
I believe the answer is ‘yes’.
In parenting class, we were taught that making the “shhh” sound is one of the universal techniques for calming a newborn (together with such things as “swaddling” and “swinging”), so it appears to be hard-wired into humans and not culturally dependant.
The ‘shh’ sound for babies apart, the word for ‘hush’ in German is ‘psst’ (often pronounced psht). Confusingly it’s used for ‘be quiet’ as well as ‘look at me - I am going to whisper to you’.
It’s supposed to replicate the sounds that the baby was used to hearing in the womb and so is familiar and calming to them.
I doubt it’s universal because the sound it represents, /ʃ/, does not exist in many languages.
Yes, but, as far as I know, others use similar sounds, like maybe /ʂ/ or even /ts/.
indeed, and that is why in Dutch we mostly say ‘ssssst’, not ‘ʃʃʃʃʃʃʃt’ - although clearly if you went ‘ʃʃʃʃʃʃt’ in a movie theatre people would understand what you wanted. And proceed to throw popcorn at you - because if they’re rude enough to talk during a movie, there not going to gently reply to your reasonable request to STFU. So it’s a bit of both - we’ll say sssst but understand sssssht - and probably use it on occasion too (although I don’t think I do) even though it is not a sound that comes entirely naturally to us.
Interestingly, although Spanish doesn’t have a “sh” sound, we do use “sh” to shush people. Some people also use “ss” and it is also understood all around, but I have heard “sh” a whole lot more often than “ss” even if the sound doesn’t exist in Spanish.
Do you have a cite for that?
What about languages that have neither /ʃ/ nor /s/, like Hawaiian? From what I know, the closest consonant is /k/, which doesn’t seem like it would be very soothing.
Sure. “Sushing” is one of the “five S’s” of baby soothing, according to this fellow (and the class I was taught):
http://www.babyslumber.com/happiestbaby.html
Note that it isn’t a particular word, simply any noise that sounds approximately like “shhhhh”. We were taught that “shhh” was a good approximation.
The linguistic speculation is all my own. The notion (and I have no cite for it, it is pure speculation) is that if babies are soothed by sounds like “shhhh”, pretty well every language will use something analogous to it to mean “quiet, hush”. They may not of course represent that sound with the same consonants, but it will be recognizably similar.