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Answering a "yes or no" question with single words meaning yes or no is by no means universal. About half the world's languages typically employ an echo response: repeating the verb in the question in an affirmative or a negative form. Some of these also have optional words for yes and no, like Hungarian, Russian, and Portuguese.
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In English, these are yes and no respectively, in French oui, si and non, in Danish ja, jo and nej, in Spanish sí and no and so on. Not all languages make such common use of particles of this type; in some (such as Welsh) it is more common to repeat the verb or another part of the predicate, with or without negation accordingly.
As is typical of verbs in virtually all languages, Spanish verbs express an action or a state of being of a given subject, and like verbs in most Indo-European languages, Spanish verbs undergo inflection according to the following categories: Tense: past, present, or future; Number: singular or plural; Person: first, second or third
Irish and Scottish Gaelic lack the words "yes" and "no" altogether. In Welsh, the words for "yes" and "no" ("ie" and "nage") are restricted to specialized circumstances. Like Finnish, the main way in these languages to state yes or no, to answer yes–no questions, is to echo the verb of the question. In Irish, the question "An dtiocfaidh tú?"
Interrogative sentences are generally divided between yes–no questions, which ask whether or not something is the case (and invite an answer of the yes/no type), and wh-questions, which specify the information being asked about using a word like which, who, how, etc.
The cognates in the table below share meanings in English and Spanish, but have different pronunciation. Some words entered Middle English and Early Modern Spanish indirectly and at different times. For example, a Latinate word might enter English by way of Old French, but enter Spanish directly from Latin. Such differences can introduce ...
The verb fue has no dummy subject, and the pronoun el que is not a cleaver but a nominalising relative pronoun meaning "the [male] one that". Provided we respect the pairings of " el que " and " las llaves ", we can play with the word order of the Spanish sentence without affecting its structure – although each permutation would, to a native ...