Re: Interlect: YAIAL, a personal view

Carlos Thompson wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>
> > En réponse à Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:
> >
> > > > ba: interrogative particle - used at the end of a sentence asks if
> > > the
> > > > sentence is true.
> > > >   Si Carlos pire li domo ba? - Does Carlos burn the house?
> > >
> > > Why is it placed at the end of the sentence?  It might be less
> > > confusing if it came right at the beginning -- otherwise the
>sentence
> > > will be parsed as a statement until the very last word!
> >
> > I'm not Carlos, but I guess it's placed at the end of the sentence
>because the
> > Chinese "ba" from which it's obviously borrowed is placed at the end
>of the
> > sentence. Japanese also puts its interrogative particle "ka" at the
>end of a
> > sentence, and Japanese speakers seem to never have had problems
>recognizing
> > questions.
>
>hmmm.  It actually came from swedish tag question "va?", then I reminded
>I had no <v>...  Anyhow, you can thing of "ba" as a tag question marker.
Of course, everybody who's followed this list for a while will be aware that
Swedish essentially a very well camouflaged dialect of Chinese.

                                                  Andreas

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