[Multilingual Monday] ????

[aadroma]

intonation indicates that you're asking a question.

While not mandatory, many Semitic languages employ a "question word" -- usually untranslatable -- when a word like "who," "what," etc., doesn't exist in a sentence. Amharic uses ወይ, wey, after a verb to specify that there is, in fact, a question being asked (seen in ጥሩ ነው ወይ, t'iru näw wey, "Is

Comments

[theotherqpc]

i've always found the (American) English habit of raising the pitch of one's voice to indicate a question curious - especially when native speakers of American English learn a new language and unconsciously apply this habit to tongues where it is less pronounced or not used at all.

[progbear]

You don’t get to hear it, but I just love the little inverted question marks you get at the start of interrogatory phrases in Spanish.

One thing I thought was clever about Esperanto was the word ĉu, which designated interrogatory sentences that did not contain the equivalent of who, what, when, where, why or how.

[muckefuck]

That's just a straight borrowing of Polish czy, which has the same function (as well as serving as a conjunction with the meaning of "whether"). Similar particles (also derived from conjunctions) exist in East Slavic and Baltic languages.

This is reminiscent of an interesting colloquial usage in German: If someone wants to confirm that you've asked them a yes-no question, they may restate it as a "whether" clause, e.g.:

"Wohnst du seit vielen Jahren hier in Berlin?" ("Have you been living here in Berlin for many years?")
"Ob ich seit vielen Jahren hier wohne?" ("Whether I've been living here many years?")

I suppose you can assume an unexpressed main clause to the effect of "Fragst du mich, ob..." ("Are you asking whether..."). In any case, it's easy to see how such a construction could give rise to the Balto-Slavic usage mentioned above.

[pne]

Polish czy, which has the same function (as well as serving as a conjunction with the meaning of "whether")

Same in Esperanto, AFAIK: mi ne scias, ĉu li havas monon “I don’t know whether he has money”.

I suppose you can assume an unexpressed main clause to the effect of "Fragst du mich, ob..." ("Are you asking whether...").

That’s my bellyfeel, too. (I would have guessed that the “omitted” main clause would be Hast du gefragt, ob… “Did you ask whether…”, but yours is the same except for tense.)

[muckefuck]

Irish, being a verb-initial language, puts its particles at the start of the sentence:

"Tuigeann tú." ("You understand.")
"An dtuigeann tú?" ("Do you understand?")
"Ní thuigeann tú." ("You don't understand.")
"Nach dtuigeann tú?"/(Munster) "Ná tuigeann tú?" ("Don't you understand?")

Welsh has a similar system although in colloquial registers the particles (and in some cases even the verbs!) are often dropped. This occasionally happens in Irish as well, e.g. "'Bhfuil tú ar meisce fós?" ("Are you drunk yet?")

[wiped]

persian has the word آیا which goes at the beginning of the sentence and is mostly similar to the arabic هل, although it has other uses. urdu uses کیا (literally 'what' and used as such elsewhere) similarly at the start of sentences. actually, i think the urdu one is kind of amusing. for example, when asking "are you pakistani?" you would take the declarative statement آپ پاکستانی ہیں aap paakistaanii haiN (you are pakistani) and put کیا kyaa (what) at the front, thus کیا آپ پاکستانی ہیں؟ kyaa aap paakistaani haiN?

in my mind, the effect is like saying "what, are you pakistani!?"