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Lesson Seven: Questions

So far, all the sentences we have seen have been simple declarative sentences. If we want to ask a yes-or-no question, Esperanto provides an extremely simple method of transforming a sentence to a question: the word cxu. It literally translates as "whether", but also as "is it true that ..."

The cat is on the floor.   La kato estas sur la planko.
Is the cat on the floor?   Cxu la kato estas sur la planko?

This method is always used to ask a yes-or-no question, unlike the variety of changes that occur in English questions. There are, of course, two possible answers to such a question: jes (which is, unsurprisingly, pronounced "yes") and ne (which you have already seen used to produce negative sentences). The idiomatic expressions "... isn't it", "... doesn't it", "... haven't they" are all translated by the single phrase cxu ne (compare French "n'est-ce pas")

The cat is on the floor,   La kato estas sur la planko,
               isn't it?   cxu ne?

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Information provided by the Esperanto HyperCourse Maintainer as part of the Esperanto HyperCourse.