We say “shhh” when we want someone to be quiet and we spell it like, well, “shhh”.
What are some other languages’ “shhh”-esque ways of telling others to silence themselves?
In French, “chut”, the final “t” being pronounced.
You have here a list of other languages.
Portuguese uses the same sound as English, but spelled “chhh.”
In Spanish it’s chis, the verb is chistar and the way it would be written in a comic book’s blurb can be chis, chssss or sssshhhhh.
The French wiki article linked above seems to have been trying for chitón, another variation but one that’s more forceful and used under different circumstances: you won’t hear it in a movie theater, rather from a mother who’s sick of her child’s whinning. You could think of chis as being a request while ¡chitón! is an order.
Hebrew uses “Shhh”, as well as “Shoosh”, “Sha” and “Hass”.
In Swedish it’s schhh.
Norwegian has the verb “hysj” the same as English “hush”, but I’d probably spell the resulting hushing-sound as “shhhh”, since “sjjjjj” just looks daft.
Which makes me think that “chut” in French is more a word than an onomatopea like “shhh” in English.
In German it’s “pst”.
Which in Sweden is used to get someone’s attention in a situation where you’re supposed to be silent.
In Japanese it’s “Shi” with a short, sharp sound at the end.
That’s actually another common use of “pst” in German too.
And of chis in Spanish, but it’s generally considered rude as well as not working very well.
I know I’ve heard repeated ch used before for this purpose. But I have no idea where it comes form.
ssssst - in Dutch. That is: no /sh/ sound, although in practice people sometimes do pronounce a -sh- sound, but I’ve never seen it spelled to reflect that.
The Dog Whisperer.
Formerly the Dog Talk Slightly Too Louder, before the introduction of the ch ch ch sound.
(What about ASL? Any particular sign to stop gesticulating so wildly?)
Nava where are you from? I’ve never heard, or used “chis” in my life, it’s always been “sshh” both spoken and written.
Roughly pronounced “Fwisht” or “Whisht” in Irish/Hiberno-English
Spain and 43 years old. I’ve been seeing chis replaced by sshh in print more and more often as time went on, which I attribute to American influence: in TBOs, Guerreros del Antifaz or Capitanes Trueno you’ll see chis (but first you have to find them, since by now any original edition counts as an antique), in translated Marvel comics (which appeared in Spain in the mid-70s) you see sh - and it eventually moved on to other forms of print. It’s a similar phenomenon as the move from pum to bang (now where did I put my Mafaldas… there’s one about that, like there’s one for so many other things). As for voiced, sh is sort of an “I don’t want to be too evident” chis; people in a movie theater may react to some moron’s cellphone ringing with a low shhh, then the second time move to chis or ya vale(1), the third time a ver capullo, ¡si quieres poder hablar por teléfono alquila el deuvedé!(2)… well, that was the actual sequence about three weeks ago…
1: enough
2: hey asshole, if you wanna be able to speak on the phone hire the dvd!