this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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If pitch made differences in meaning at the word level, it would be called a tonal language afaik
English has pitch for other aspects of speech, such as indicating emphasis or what sentences are questions. Try saying "you did it" with an emphasis on the first word, without changing the volume or tempo: it'll change pitch. If you raise the "it" instead, you get a question sentence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_declarative). The pitch could make a difference for how you understand a word, like you'd not think the person said "what's that cent?" (same set of base sounds but, due to the question pitch, it's more likely "... scent?"), but it's not a fixed property of the word like in a tonal language
Variants of "mhm" are also tonal to me. I don't know if this works the same in any English-speaking region but, where I'm from, "hm" with
Not sure that's considered a word, though
Unrelated but this reminds me of a thing that happened earlier today while we were playing a board game. European languages aren't considered click languages, but we still have them. One player asked a question of another, and someone from Turkey tsk'd. They made no other sound or head movement. Apparently this meant "no"! Native DE/NL speakers won't understand that this is an answer to a question. We do use tsk here, just for other purposes. Was interesting to notice the culture difference!