Inflection for statements and questions
If I type in "Nos vemos mañana. (See you tomorrow or We'll get together tomorrow) the pronunciation is inflected down (correctly) at the end of the sentence.
BUT when I make it into a question : ¿Nos vemos mañana? the pronunciation is exactly the same by the native speaker but the inflection is incorrect since the inflection for a question should be inflected downward when there is no question word to begin the sentence.
Is this an oversite or just the mechanics of machine pronunciation?
2 Answers
My guess that it´s a combination of factors because Nos vemos mañana is normally spoken as a statement and not a question.
To make a question it´s more common to say something like: Nos vemos mañana ¿sale?
I do not know precisely where you are typing it in to get a pronunciation, but in the flashcards at least, anything more than a single word is produced by a machine translator, and never takes the punctuation in much account, although a semicolon or colon can get a pause I think (but a comma does not). So the machine does not alter inflection for question marks that I have seen. Native Speakers are on sound files, and those are provided only for single words, and the same file is provided regardless of punctuation and for most errors with accents, although not “ñ”. If there is no sound file for what is typed in it reverts to machine. I have noticed some common words don’t have files of native speakers, and some much less common ones do. I suspect the same mechanism works elsewhere. After the words in the dictionary, some of the more common words have short video files that include a speaker not only saying the word, but using it in context- but you cannot control what they say- they are recordings of an actual human.
