The lesson is about yes/no questions in Farsi. Generally speaking, there are two
types of questions in Farsi and in English as well. It's the yes/no questions
and WH questions. In WH questions, you are looking for some missing
information. So you ask the other person or some other people to give you
some information. But in yes/no questions, you have some information. You want your
information to get confirmed or refused that, oh, that's true or not. So let's look
at some examples [on] how to for to form a yes/no questions in Farsi.
So we have the sentence "تو به خانه رفتی."
So this is a statement: "تو به خانه رفتی." So the first way to
form a yes/no question in Farsi is by changing their intonation. Here the
intonation of the sentence is falling. You say "تو به خانه رفتی."
You know, it's almost falling at the end. But if you change the intonation to rising
intonation and putting the stress at the end of the sentence,
specifically the verb, you have a yes/no question. "تو به خانه رفتی?"
As you can see here we have a question and the intonation is
rising, and the end of the sentence has been stressed. Let's look at another
example: شما کتاب خریدید.
This is a statement.
You bought book. You plural. شما کتاب خریدید. So the intonation is falling. But now
we change the intonation of the sentence. And you say: شما کتاب خریدید?
شما کتاب خریدید؟
And we put the stress on the end of the sentence, specifically the verb.
So the intonation is rising, and it will be a question.
"شما کتاب خریدید؟" While the statement was like this:
"شما کتاب خریدید." So .there was there is no stress on the end
But in the in the question form, there's stress on the end and the intonation
is rising. This is the the most common way to form a yes/no question,
specifically in spoken Persian. Another way to form a yes/no question is
is using the word آیا.
آیا. As you saw in the previous example there is no change
in world order. In English, to have a yes/no question, you need to change the
word order in the sentence. In Farsi you don't need such a thing. And even in the
second way to form the yes/no question, you don't need to change the word order.
You just put the word "آیا" in the beginning of the sentence and then you
have a yes/no question:
آیا آنها آمدند؟
آیا آنها آمدند؟ Again there is rising intonation and you're putting
the stress on the end of the sentence. "Did they come?"
"Did they come?" "آیا آنها آمدند؟" So this form,
using the word آیا, it's mostly in writing Persian when there is no way to
change the intonation of the sentence to show the reader that there is a yes/no
question here. But at the same time it's very common in spoken Persian too, so
the two ways, one is just spoken but the other one is common between
spoken and written Persian. Let's look at another example:
آیا
شما به آنجا رفتید؟ Just by putting the word آیا in the beginning of a
sentence، you have a yes/no question. "آیا شما به آنجا رفتید؟" So there is
a change in intonation. So if we remove "آیا" from the beginning of the
sentence and the question mark, then you have a statement. "شما به آنجا رفتید."
You went there. You you went there. But if we put all "آیا"
back here, "آیا شما به آنجا رفتید؟", then we have a question.
Did you go there? Did you go there? So these are two ways to form a yes/no
question in Farsi: changing the intonation, using a rising intonation, and
the other one is using the word "آیا", putting it in the beginning of a
statement and make it to a yes/no question.