"Is Australia a continent?"
Translation:Ĉu Aŭstralio estas kontinento?
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I don't know if "ĉu estas Aŭstralio kontinento" is correct or not, but thinking this way helped Duolingo's preffered word order make more sense to me:
If you think of "ĉu" as "is the following correct?", then the phrase "ĉu: Aŭstralio estas kontinento?" with an imaginary colon would be "is this correct: Australia is a continent".
That might not be very helpful, but it worked for me.
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Can anyone tell me why 'Cxu Auxstralio kontinentas?' does not work. Thank you in advance.
I think because a continent is not a state of being, but a noun. So the sentence would mean, " Is Australia continenting?", which doesn't make sense, to me anyway.
You can verb adjectives to mean "to be [adj]", but you can't verb nouns to mean "to be [n]". Verbing a noun means you're using the noun. Kind of like "hammer" in English.
Wait, isnt the second-last letter of Australio part of the suffix? Is it Aŭstral-io or Aŭstrali-o? Because it didn't take as correct "Aŭstralujo"
Is it Aŭstral-io or Aŭstrali-o?
It's Aŭstrali-o: https://vortaro.net/#A%C5%ADstralio_kd
(Notice that the "8" for "this word was added in the 8th official addition to the universal dictionary" is after the "i" and before the "o".)
Country names are also capitalised.
Inhabitants and country-based adjectives are capitalised by some but lowercase by others. (The majority probably uses lower case: franco "a Frenchman", la angla "English (= the English language). But "Franco" and "la Angla" are also possible.)