lesson 17: questions
Questions
Questions usually come in two flavours:
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yes / no questions. These are questions that can be answered with yes or no, positively or negatively.
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open-ended questions. These are like filling the blanks: who did it? did what? to whom? where? why?
Yes / no questions
Question
Remember how in the previous lesson, we’ve learned to negate a sentence by finding the first word in the verb? We do something similar to make yes / no questions. We double the first word in the verb, and put an ala in between:
does ... eat?
pipi li moku ala moku e len?
Does the moth eat the cloth?
is ... good?
kalama musi li pona ala pona tawa sina?
Is the music good to you? (Do you like the music?)
does ... want to ...?
sina wile ala wile lape lon supa?
Do you want to sleep in the bed?
is ... at ...?
ona li lon ala lon ma Mewika?
Are they in the US?
It’s a little unusual to an English speaker! But you can see something similar in Mandarin.
Answer
English has a special word for ‘yes’. Toki Pona instead does what Finnish, Mandarin, Latin, and many other languages do: you reply with the verb for ‘yes’, and a verb + ala for ‘no’.
sitelen li musi ala musi?
Is the video fun?
fun. (= It is.)
not fun. (= It's not.)
The V ala V pattern is very common! But there’s another one:
what? which?
or
... right? isn't it? or what?
You can add anu seme at the end of any statement to make it a question:
sitelen li musi anu seme?
The video is fun, right?
You can answer it with musi or musi ala, just like a normal yes / no question! But the vibe is slightly different. If you use anu seme, it’s more likely that you expect the other person to agree with you.
Open-ended questions
So we just learned that seme means ‘what?’, and it’s the most important part of open-ended questions! seme is like a blank space in the sentence that you want the other person to fill in with their information:
waso li lon seme?
Where is the bird? (lit. 'The bird is at what?')
waso li lon tomo.
The bird is at home.
soweli li utala e jan seme?
Who did the animal attack? (lit. 'The animal attacked which person?')
soweli li utala e jan Ema.
The animal attacked Emma.
Notice how only seme gets swapped out for the answer — everything else in the sentence stays in the same order! This is unlike English, where questions reorder the sentence, to put the wh-word first, but Toki Pona doesn’t do that.