"Czy lew to nie kot?"
Translation:Is a lion not a cat?
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I love this translation. It comes across as a rhetorical device in English...something you might hear in a poem. First thing that popped into my head was Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech "Ain't I a woman?"
In English this question construction is highly unusual. Perhaps if someone wanted to take their pet lion into a pub, but the barman says, "Only cats are allowed inside", the person might ask, "But, isn't a lion a cat?"
A more usual translated response to this Polish question would be, "Is a lion a cat?"
In Polish it means the same as your pub sentence. Yes, it's not usual, but it's a grammatical structure worth knowing.
The negation should precede the verb. So just think of "to nie" as an short form of "to nie jest", where the "jest" is implied.
2016
Would "A lion is not a cat?" be okay, as a reaction not believing what someone else said or is the "czy" indicating, that you have to translate it to a "real" question?
- 895
Omg the fast version of the audio file is impossible to understand xD There are like no spaces between the words ._.
I like this one better as well. But both versions are correct and accepted in the reverse exercise.
In rhetorical questions like this, "czy" is sometimes replaced by "czyż", for example "Czyż nie dobija się koni?" is the translation of McCoy's "They shoot horses, don't they?”.