Indirect Questions (question word + αν)

A direct question - «Πού μένει;» (“Where does he live?”) - becomes an INDIRECT question when embedded after a verb like ρωτάω, ξέρω, λέω: Ρώτησε πού μένει (“He asked where he lives”). Greek keeps the QUESTION WORD (πού, πώς, πότε, γιατί, τι) and follows it with a plain INDICATIVE statement - no inversion, no auxiliary, no word-order change, and (as always) no backshift. The interrogatives keep their tonos even embedded: accented πού/πώς are the question words, while unaccented που is the relative “that/which” and πως is the complementizer “that” - the accent is the whole difference. For an embedded YES/NO question, English uses “whether/if”; Greek uses αν (unaccented): Δεν ξέρω αν θα έρθει (“I don’t know whether he’ll come”), Με ρώτησε αν μένω εδώ (“He asked whether I live here”). This αν is the same word as conditional “if”, but here it introduces a yes/no question - still followed by an ordinary indicative.