the.com/intonation
The music under your words that decides if 'fine' means fine or a funeral.
means The rise and fall of pitch in speech that shapes meaning, mood, and whether a sentence is a question, a statement, or a threat.
from From Latin intonare, 'to thunder' or 'to sound out' — a fusion of in- ('into') and tonare ('to thunder'), itself related to tonus ('tone, stretched string'). The thunder sense gradually softened over centuries into the musical, speech-related meaning we use now — so somewhere in its DNA, intonation still remembers how to make noise.
- rising pitch
- turns any sentence into a question, apparently
- tonal languages
- mandarin: same syllable, four pitches, four meanings
- sarcasm tool
- flattens words into their exact opposite meaning
- babies first
- infants mimic melody before they learn actual words