How can I add an emotional undertone in English?

Kornblumenratte@feddit.de to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 85 points –

Context: I'm missing a cutting board. So I wrote in our telegram family group: "Wo ist eigentlich unser zweites großes Schneidebrett hin?" (literally: "Where is actually our second big cuttingboard thither?").

By using the modal particle "eigentlich" I insinuate that something is oddly off and express an emotional state of curiousity and/or mild discontent.

By adding "hin", I notify that I ask because it is not where it is supposed to be and not because I don't know where it should be.

Now I ask myself, how would I express this additional information in English?

Edit: Thank you all for your answers! I learned a lot. Just our cutting board is still gone, and probably enjoying it's freedom somewhere ... I suppose.

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German Modalpartikeln are rather unique to the language, so really hard to translate. To convey the same "feeling" you'd probably need to rely on other resources, like:

  • synonyms;
  • figures of speech;
  • interjections;
  • a more or less direct grammar;
  • punctuation, emojis, etc.

For example, I feel like your sentence could be translated like "Our second cutting board is curiously missing. Does anyone know where it is?". That "curiously" performing a similar job as "eigentlich", and the indirect phrasing of the second sentence highlighting that you have no clue on where it is. It's still missing the "it is not here" connotation of "hin", but I guess that it's good enough?

[Caveat lector: I'm not fully proficient in English, and certainly not in German. So... yeah.]

"is curiously missing" could also be replaced with other verbs that capture the unexpected / curious nature of its absence such as "has vanished" or "has disappeared".

Those could work, too. It's a good example of using synonyms to give different connotations - all those words convey that the cutting board is not there, but in different ways.

Vanished/disappeared is of course impossible literally but, colloquially, it definitely suggests something unusual happened without directly sounding accusatory. To me it reads a bit more lighthearted than other options. And I don't think it would be misinterpreted in text form.

Dad would always say, "Who took the cutting board?" And not in a nice way lol.

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