"Are you a cat?"
Translation:Jesteś kotem?
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We usually don't accept the 'second gender' words for animals, but somehow I do add "kotka" everywhere... so yeah, I can add it here as well.
Back to the costume party,
Kid 1 to Kid 2: Jesteś tygrysem. Kid 2: Tak :) Kid 3 to kid 2: Jesteś kotem? Kid 2 to kid 3: Nie! Jestem tygrysem! Kid 2:.. tygrys jest kotem. :"(
(Im just continuing an idea from another thread don't mind me..)
It's another possibility, but "czy" isn't really that common. It's useful, but not obligatory.
(I wrote it about statements, but the same applies to questions, only the intonation is different and in writing there is a question mark at the end ;-))
When speaking about first (I, we) or second (you) person, one uses verb to be (być) with instrumental to connect subject and predicate. So (ja) jestem psem (I am a dog), (ty) jesteś człowiekiem (thou art a man), (my) jesteśmy fantastami (we are sci-fi fans), (wy) jesteście graczami (you are gamers).
When speaking about third person (somebody or something else), then it is popular to connect subject and predicate by neuter pronoun to: ona to pies or ona jest psem (she is a dog), krzesła to meble or krzesła są meblami (chairs are furnitures) etc.
Clauses like ty to kot are perfectly understandable, but they sound very unnatural.
Emphasis for sure; the second form emphasize te subject more. But as a native, I've never encouterd the second form used in a question, so I'm not entirely sure it's correct.
"Ty to kot" translates to you are cat. It's more of a statement then a question (i think)
The 'to' construction can only be used if you have nouns on both sides, we believe that "ty to kot" is just too clunky. "Garfield to kot" is okayish, although "Garfield jest kotem" really sounds better to me.
„Tak”, not „Da”. «Да» is a word in Russian. In Polish „da” has completely different meaning.
I wrote "Czy ty to kot?" And it said thay it was wrong. My Polish girlfriend said that my answer was correct, actually
We just consider using the 'to' construction after a personal pronoun to be very, very clumsy.
Let's take a more probable sentence: You are a man. I googled "ty jesteś mężczyzną" and got 23 000 results. Then I checked "ty to mężczyzna" and although at first it gave quite a big number of results, going to the 2nd page actually shows that the number of results is... 11. And a few of them aren't even exactly what I was trying to search for.
No, there's no need to use "ty". The context and the form of the verb make it perfectly clear.
Well, English has "I am", but "you are" and "he is"... and am/are/is are forms of the same verb, aren't they? Same happens in Polish, but for every verb and every grammatical person.
"jestem" is "I am", "jest" is "he/she/it is", and "czy" isn't a form of "być" (to be), "czy" is used at the beginning of yes/no questions to show that it's a real yes/no question and not a surprised "What? You're a cat?!".
The first suggested word for cat (kot) is incorrect. If you were to follow the suggestions for thr correct answer, you would get [jesteś kot], which is incorrect. Why is it wrong, and why is that suggestion first?
The verb 'to be' in Polish is most commonly followed by a noun or noun phrase in the instrumental case, which is 'kotem'. I've fixed the hint.
Yes, I guess we could consider the version starting with "Czy" more formal, but it's perfectly fine to omit it.