The odd part is that in the wild, the kitten doesn’t stay with the mother all that long.

That reminds me Cruela.

My cat Kika once got pregnant. We were able to give all kittens new homes, except one - that stayed with us. She grew into adulthood, not only pampered by the humans but also by her mum Kika.

Cruela would find an open window, take a walk, then come back after a few hours. And then when she was back, she’d ask Kika to be licked. And every single time Kika would lick her manchild womanchild catkitten daughter for a few minutes, then meow angrily and paw her once or twice, as if saying “you’re clean now you adult baby, now sod off!”. Every single time.

Siegfrieda: self-heating pillow, food bringer, good companion.

Kika: “it’s a human so of course it’s disgusting. But it slaps my butt so good~ A shame that it’s too stupid to understand that it should be massaging me 25h/day.”

more [with a higher pitch]

Yes, I can. /me leaves the room

Serious now, this sentence is a great example because, even if phrased as a yes/no question, you’ll typically see it being used as a request - “please tell me more”. And as such you’ll often hear it without the higher pitch associated with yes/no questions.

It could be worse. You could speak a minority language. Then this shit stops being “mildly infuriating” to become “frankly depressing”.

Do you really pronounce those with a higher pitch? Or do you pronounce them louder?

EDIT: that is a genuine question given that a lot of people conflate stress (louder; more dB) with pitch (higher tone; more Hz), and the examples provided hint prosodic stress, not prosodic intonation, since in English prosodic stress is often used for emphasis.

Do you really think thats true?

“Rhetorical” questions - like this one - are specially interesting because, while they follow the syntax of a genuine question, they’re pragmatically assertions. You’re implying “this is not true”, even if you’re phrasing it as a question.

And that phrasal pitch contour that you see in yes/no questions is dictated by the pragmatical purpose of the utterance, so if the “question” is not actually a question, it doesn’t get it.

Yeah - I noticed it after reading your other comment. Fair point.

Coupling it with info from the Mandarin article that I’ve linked, it seems to apply to declarative (yes-no) questions only.

Good catch - WH-questions tend to have a pitch drop instead.

Now thinking, Portuguese and Italian seem to follow the same pattern as English.

The general pattern seems cross-linguistically consistent.

As I checked from an article, at least in Mandarin the usage of particles happens alongside the change in intonation, not at the expense of it.

Also note that even [some? all?] Germanic languages show something similar - but instead of a particle, you get a syntactical movement (verb fronting) overtly marking the question. Examples:

In English this is slightly obscured by do-support being obligatory for most verbs, but note how it’s the same process - if you were to insert the “do” without a question, in the third sentence, it would end as “the cat does meow”.

I was expecting Mandarin to be an exception, since the language uses pitch to encode different words; apparently it isn’t, the speakers simply “abstract” the phonemic vs. phrasal pitch variations as two different things, when interpreting the sentence. Check figure 6.

And while there is a particle overtly conveying “this is a question”, ⟨吗⟩ /ma⁰/ (the “0” indicates neutral tone), it seems that you can couple it with an assertive phrasal pitch to convey rhetorical questions. And other languages (like e.g. German and English, that overtly mark questions with verb fronting) show a similar pattern.

I also found some literature claiming that it might be cross-linguistically consistent

The most important observations are the following:

1. pitch tends to decline from the beginning of an IP [intonational phrase] to the end, a tendency known as declination;
2. the beginning of an IP may be marked by a local sharp rise in pitch or “reset”;
3. in IPs that are utterance-final and/or in statements, there may be a local drop in pitch at the end of the IP in addition to any overall declination spanning the IP as a whole;
4. in IPs that are in questions and/or are not utterance-final, declination may be moderated, suspended or even reversed, i.e. the overall trend may be less steeply declining, level, or even slightly rising;
5. in addition to exhibiting reduced declination, non-final and interrogative IPs may also have a local rise in pitch at the end, or at least have no local drop.

The validity of these observations, as general tendencies, is not in doubt.

The article also lays out some potential explanations for this. The basic gist of it is, nobody knows why but everyone has a guess.

EDIT: as another user (ABCDE) correctly pointed out, keep in mind that this works differently for open-ended vs. yes/no questions.

I tried GenAI. It simply doesn’t get the vibe right, as it makes both Mario and Pikachu a bit too cheerful and tries to make the picture a bit too dynamic.

I’m trying to trace the characters over to see if I can output a somewhat decent sketch. At least to give people an idea of what I mean.

I don’t think that dreams are a good threshold. Mostly based on personal anecdote - sometimes I dream with random stuff in Talian, for example, and I’m definitively not proficient in it. (Including some shitty bilingual jokes, like an angry pig surrounded by bananas praying to the sky.)

I wish that I had enough drawing skills to do this, but:

Imagine obese (morbidly so) versions of Mario and Pikachu. Both with blood on their mouths, and faces that strongly remind Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”. Mario holds half of the body of a dead Tanzee (a Palworld pal), and is strongly implied to be eating it; Pikachu does it with the Yuzu logo, or something else.

There are only three things written in the whole picture.

• Top right corner: Nintendo’s logo.
• Centre bottom: “we were starving”, followed by “私たち二人は飢えていました。” (ditto; might as well check the grammar as I don’t speak JP, I used a machine translator).

ich habe noch kein einziges “du hast mich” bis jetzt

Auch weil alles Liebe in Lemmy ist, ja? /witz

People with no friends confirmed as nihillingual. /s

[Caveat lector: I’m not from language acquisition, my main area of knowledge within Linguistics is Historical Linguistics.]

Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development.

That’s the critical period hypothesis. It’s more complicated than it looks like, and academically divisive; some say that it’s simply the result of people having higher exposure and incentive to learn a language before they’re 12yo, while some claim that it’s due to changes in cerebral structures over time.

And then there’s people like Chomsky who claim that the so-called “window of opportunity” is to learn Language as a human faculty, not to learn a specific language like Mandarin, Spanish, English etc.

It’s complicated; different people put the cut-off point in different places. And to complicate it further language proficiency isn’t just one but at least two (production vs. reception), if not four (hearing, speaking, reading, writing).

That said, in my personal and subjective view, a person is proficient enough in a language to say “I speak it” when they’re able to use it for a simple conversation about a topic that they know, without too much effort or reliance on external tools.

Se hablás castellano entonces complica, ya que no hablo. Excepto cuando borracho*. Aún asi, no es castellano, es más como portitañol…

*de veras, che. Una vodca hoy sería genial.

Du irrst dich, Brudi - niemand spricht Deutsch hier.