Spanish to Uyghur: ¿Vienes? asks a question without an interrogative word
Question marks can carry a major distinction
Spanish Vienes and ¿Vienes? can contain exactly the same verb form while performing different jobs: the first states that the addressee is coming, and the second asks whether that is so. A Spanish-to-Uyghur translation must preserve that difference even when there is no Spanish word equivalent to whether in the input. Punctuation here helps identify the intended speech act.
The Universal Dependencies description of Uyghur identifies the interrogative suffix -mu on verbs. This provides a concrete reason not to translate a Spanish yes-or-no question by merely copying the corresponding Uyghur statement and adding a question mark. The target has its own grammatical resources for marking interrogativity; Spanish need not supply a separate interrogative word for those resources to be appropriate.
Whether someone comes is different from who comes
Compare ¿Viene Ana? with ¿Quién viene? The first seeks confirmation about Ana; the second seeks the identity of the person coming. Translating both as an undifferentiated question about arrival would remove the distinction between a proposed answer and missing information. In particular, the name Ana is part of the proposition being checked, not an instruction to replace an interrogative pronoun.
Spanish allows ¿Ana viene? as well as ¿Viene Ana?, with discourse and intonation affecting their use. An automatic rule that recognizes questions only when the subject follows the verb would miss a perfectly possible source question. The written question marks and the surrounding exchange are more reliable than that single word-order test.
Uyghur’s documented dominant order is subject–object–verb, while other orders also occur. Spanish inversion should therefore not be preserved as a sequence of translated words. In a longer question about whether Ana has read a particular message, both the object’s relationship to the verb and the interrogative meaning need to survive the restructuring.
Negation must remain inside the question
¿No vienes? is still a question, although it contains no. It can ask for confirmation of an apparent non-arrival, often with an expectation formed by the preceding conversation. Turning it into No vienes would replace a request for an answer with an assertion. Deleting no instead would change the proposition about which confirmation is requested.
Consider an exchange in which a friend previously agreed to attend, then mentions being busy. A follow-up ¿No vienes? asks about the apparent change. In a different exchange, No vienes, ya lo sé acknowledges an established fact. The same negative verb sequence is doing different work; translating the words without their sentence function would collapse those exchanges.
Informal Spanish messages sometimes omit the opening question mark, and isolated vienes may leave the intended function uncertain. That uncertainty should not be disguised as certainty about either an assertion or a question. Where the source clearly provides ¿…?, however, the Uyghur result should remain an interrogative construction rather than depend on the reader to reinterpret a bare statement.
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