On 2/11/2023 11:52 PM, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> For English, imagine most of our sentences were formed by saying "Now
> let's talk about X: ..." Which is kinda how Japanese "wa" operates: you
> clearly establish the topic X, then make your statement or question etc
> about it.
And in Japanese, you don't usually know if the sentence is a question,
statement, etc until the end of the sentence is reached. This feature
makes it hard to communicate in Japanese when the comm channel is
unreliable, as the telephone used to be even in the 1950s and later. So
Japanese speakers used to repeat sentence fragments, repeatedly asking
if the listener understood the last bit.
Whether the same is true for Chinese I don't know.
