Re: Question about Questions

On Sun, Sep 16, 2001 at 11:50:48PM +0200, Christian Thalmann wrote:
[snip]
> That got me wondering what such an interrogative intonation would sound
> like...  all languages I've come in contact with so far raise the pitch
> of the voice towards the end of the sentence.  Is that some sort of
> global constant of human communication or just another IEism?  What
> other ways are there in the langs of the world?
[snip]

Mandarin Chinese doesn't raise the pitch at the end of a question
(obviously, since it's tonal and the meaning of words would drastically
change if the pitch changed). My L1 (Hokkien) doesn't either. Both signal
questions by various interrogative constructions -- e.g. "you3 mei2 you3?"
in Mandarin: "is there or is there not?", i.e., do you have such and such,
or have you done such and such -- or particles (like "ma1").

My L1 uses interrogative particles such as the trailing "o:2" -- which I
suspect comes from a contraction of the more verbose "u3 bo2" (equiv. of
Mandarin "you3 mei2 you3"). There's also "a3" (or "a:3"?), not sure where
this comes from.


T

--
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves
upon execution. -- Robert Sewell

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