this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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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.