"Is that milk or water?"
Translation:To je mléko nebo voda?
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See the Tips and notes for this skill (web only) or any other grammar resource about grammatical cases.
I read the tips and notes and it seems that water is the object of the sentence and therefore should call for accusative, not nominative version of the noun. Question: Is that milk or water? Statement: That is milk or water. That is object of sentence. Milk or water are objects. Or am I wrong about my sense of grammar. VladuFu-thanks so much for your very helpful responses to the discussions. I have learned so much from you.
No, it is not an object, not a normal one anyway. "To be something" does not use a normal direct object. Not just in Czech, in all languages with cases I know.
Thank you very much. This helps. I'm learning a lot about grammar by studying Czech.
If I'm looking for the correct sequence of words, shouldn't it be "Je to mléko[..]?" instead of "To je mléko[..]?" I always understood that "is that [sth]?" questions were written as "Je to" and "that is [sth]" statements were written as "To je"
"To je..." and "Je to..." are often pretty much interchangeable and both can be statements as well as questions.
If it was just "To je mléko?", than it would be more of statement-like question, just like English "That's milk?". But given a choice "X or Y" it really doesn't matter if we use "To je...?" or "Je to...?"