Re: Question about Questions

Here's another one, from Serbian and Croatian. Croatian makes the question
as

Govoris li hrvatski? (Do you speak Croatian)
speak-2ps interr.part. Croatian

whereas Serbian

Da li govoris srpski? (Do you speak Serbian)

in which the "da li" is the "interrogative particle"

Each form is valid in the other language, this is just the most common way
to do it in each language.

----ferko

"Nature and Nature's Law lay hid in night; God said, "Let Tesla be" and
all was light." - B.A. Behrend at AIEE Conference, May 18, 1917

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On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, David Peterson wrote:

> In a message dated 9/16/01 2:51:12 PM, cinga@GMX.NET writes:
>
> << 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? >>
>
>     I'm fairly sure that Russian doesn't do this.  Or wait, it does...  But
> only kind of...?
>
> "Vy govoritye po-ruski?"
>
> What's the stress pattern on that?  I'm almost inclined to say that it's (and
> I hope this comes out correctly):
>
>
>                     ri-
> Vy go-vo-
>
>                tye pa-ruski?
>
> Is this right?
>
> -David
>