Then as you ask “provide sources.”, it says simply “Source: Tech Review Websites”. If this came from an actual person I would genuinely ask it “do you take me for gullible trash?”.

It’s still somewhat useful, due to Google Search crumbling away into nothingness, if you ask “link me five sites with info about [topic]”.

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.

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 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.)

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.

“Hic est aedus!” “«Aedus»?? Haedus uel aedes?” “Sic.”

[“There’s a goom here!” “«Goom»?? A goat, or a room?” “Yup, that’s it.”]

…okay the joke doesn’t work when translated.

I’m not suggesting Arch, but Arch-based distros. Manjaro doesn’t break anywhere as often as Arch does.

…or alternatively go with Mint and re-learn how to handle the packages. pacman vs. APT is not a big deal anyway.

Its all just to play games.

Ditto - that W3.11 install is just because of the Windows Entertainment Pack, I love a few of the games in it (like Pipe Dream). I don’t even know if it’s able to connect to the internet!

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

I started with a Knoppix-based distro, called Kurumin. KDE 3 was the rage back then!

On your main point: the shell might be hard in the beginning, but for most things that you need to use the shell with, people on the internet already had the same issue and shared how to do it. Unless you’re actively trying to make something different, like I did with my audio switching script.

And even the sort of situation that you need to use the shell for decreased by a lot from back then to now.

Besides what other users said: if you feel comfortable with SteamOS you might want to give EndeavourOS and Manjaro a check - all three distros are based on Arch Linux, and while Arch is geared towards experienced users the later two try to “sell” it towards a wider audience.

A good definition of witch hunting would be “to publicly label one or more individuals as belonging to an undesired group, with little to no regard to accuracy”. It fits really well what the article claims those users to be doing.