I could be wrong here, but it seems to me that a common aspect amongst all languages is the tendency to raise the pitch of your voice slightly when asking a question. Especially at the end of a question sentence.
If I’m wrong about this raised pitch being common amongst all languages, at the very least do all languages change their tone slightly to indicate that a question is being asked?
I guess there needs to be some way to indicate what is and isn’t a question. Perhaps a higher pitched voice reflects uncertainty. Is this something deep rooted in humans, or just an arbitrary choice when language developed?
They seem to have a rise-drop, at least when I say them.
“How old are you?” is interesting because the rise is on the third-last word (“old”). But “How old is your daughter?” has the rise in the first syllable of daughter.
I’m totally with you. I think it is somewhat speaker dependent, but that is how I would say those questions.
What’s your NAme
How OLD (are you)?
Where are you FROm?
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.
That’s just emphasis. You can tell because you can shift it to another word.
Switching the emphasis on one word can completely change the meaning of a phrase, there’s one example I love: “I never said she stole his money”