"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.
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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.
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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.
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Are continent names capitalized while country names aren't?
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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.)
