this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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In Spanish questions are phrased the same way as affirmations, when you are speaking the only difference is the intonation. Without a mark to say you are starting to read a question it's possible that the meaning changes in the end which would be annoying. (Source: Portuguese is the same but has no inverted question mark, and sometimes it's mighty annoying, especially with long questions)
Funny enough English does this all the time:
All have different intonations and punctuation but are otherwise the same. Internet lingo does compensate for this somewhat but at least in "proper" form the above holds true for all kinds of situations
1 Food that is edible
2 Tasty food
3 Bad looking food
4 Either happy or disgusted at what was just in your mouth
5 Defending your cooking after it’s referred to as 1-4
Imagine if you could ask questions like "James, Mary, and Jack went to the market last Saturday to buy a shovel, a black bag, and some gloves, to bury Karen's corpse in the deep dark woods?"
No no no, James, Mary, and Jack went to the market last Saturday to buy a shovel, a black bag, and some flashlights, to bury Karen's corpse in the deep dark woods
English can do that too, but it’s not really a “proper” way of doing it. The proper way would be to say “is that food?”
There are languages where the only way to pose a question is to change the intonation.
But doesn't the intonation simply go up in the end? So it's good enough to stumble over the ? in the end.
I honestly haven’t paid attention where it starts going up. But I always thought that doing the two “?”s in Spanish was pretty clever for that reason.
True, though doing this makes it sound incredulous.
In Spanish it's just how questions are.
¿What if you just used them anyway?
¡Problem solved!
Yeah that's true for any language really
Not really. In my language subject and verb get switched around in a question. So you immediately know it’s a question when you start reading the sentence.
Can you give me an example?
Edit: Ok thanks guys, I got it :D
Maybe
but taken to the extreme?
Can you give me an example - Question
You can give me an example - Affirmation
Hij schreef een bericht. (He wrote a message)
Schreef hij een bericht? (Did he wrote a message?)
Zeg eens, waarom wil je zo graag met een CEO slapen?
Fuck Spez daarom
I know you already got it but a few others came to my mind:
Finnish, which not a tonal language:
Japanese:
I think you'll find the pattern of question words/suffixes in nearly every language that is not explicitly tonal.
Yeah that's initially why I thought there was no difference to Spanish. But the difference is Spanish actually doesn't have an option where you switch subject and verb. Didn't know that :)
Oh. Very good point. I did not know that either.
É de facto irritante. Nada como estar na escola e um prof pede para ler. Estás calmamente a ler o texto e de repente tens de forçar a porcaria da entoação para sobrecompensar o facto de que não reparaste que era uma pergunta