In spoken English, you can make a statement into a question by the tone of your voice. Is this also done in non-English languages?
(Modern) Hebrew – all the time.
I’m pretty sure you can do it in French.
Sure… like tu viens?
Ca va? Ca va.
I think it was mentioned in a recent thread that most (all?) Spanish questions are like this. It’s one of the reasons that Spanish has the upside-down question mark at the beginning of questions…there’s no linguistic clue in the sentence itself to indicate its interrogatory nature (as there is in English).
All yes/no question in spanish are like that.
Wh- questions are given away by the wh- word. Donde, cuando, como, quien
In Mandarin, yes, and there is also a word (ma) that you can add at the end of a statement to make it into a question – kind of like, “Its hot outside, eh?”
Russian and Armenian both allow this as well.
If I say “Habla Maria Espanol?” instead of “Maria Habla Espanol?” am I doing it wrong, or am I just doing it stiltedly?
-FrL-
Not a grammarian, but both are right.
In Bulgarian, you need to add the word “li” if it’s a yes or no question. So you can’t change “you speak Bulgarian” into “do you speak Bulgarian?” just by the tone of voice, although other than the “li”, they would be the same.
govorish bulkarski = you speak Bulgarian.
govorish li bulkarski = do you speak Bulgarian?
But if the answer to the question is not yes or no, then yes, you can turn a statement into a question with just the tone of voice.
Language nerds may be interested to know that the “li” placement changes the meaning of the question. “Govorish bulgarski li?” means “you speak Bulgarian?” as opposed to all of the other, far more useful, languages in the world.
It is commonly done in Bengali and other Indo-Aryan languages.
“Habla Maria espanol?” is correct. It is not as common, though. Come to think of it, I don’t think I have heard it outside of spanish courses… still, it is perfectly correct and would be understood everywhere.
A large number of languages use various registers including tone to indicate a question. Tone and Pitch are very common devices, and it’s been proposed (although not entirely accepted) that a rising tone universally indicates a question. It’s most common to see a falling or neutral tone at the end of a question when the language being spoken uses tones to create lexical contrast.
Done all the time in Japanese, especially in informal speach.
¿Habla María español? is correct, although less common. You definitely get to study it in Spanish class, though (even as first language), and to use it.
Part of the reason why ¿María habla español? would be more common is that in Spanish you don’t need to restate the subject within a conversation. If you’d already been speaking about María, all you’d say is “¿habla español?”, María being assumed to still be the object of the conversation. If you’re introducing the subject for the first time (i.e., it’s the first time in the conversation that you mention María), then putting it as the first word emphasizes its importance.
You can do it in Indonesian too. (There are other ways, but in the vernacular, this is probably the most commonly used method.)
Is there a reason why this is so common amongst languages? Why raise the tone? Why not lower it, or add some sort of warbling noise etc.?