• DreamButt@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    33
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Funny enough English does this all the time:

    • That’s food.
    • That’s food!
    • That’s food?
    • That’s food?!
    • That’s food…

    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

    • schmidtster@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      25
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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?”

      • Metal Zealot@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        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

    • margaritox@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Littleborat@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        But doesn’t the intonation simply go up in the end? So it’s good enough to stumble over the ? in the end.

        • margaritox@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.