Help with basic sentence structure?

[Lucas Whitt]

So to say
"whose white house is that?"
I can say:
"dare no shiro no ie desu ka"
But could I also say:
"Shiro no ie wa dare no desu ka" ?

 

[Majestic]

Yes - its an inversion of the sentence, so its the difference between saying "Whose white house is that?" and "That white house is whose?"

But...to my non-native ears shiro no ie sounds unusual. For some reason I would prefer to hear shoroi uchi (or, even better, shiroi ouchi). Toritoribe-san will straighten me out if I'm wrong.

 

[Toritoribe]

"Shiro no ie" has a different meaning from just "white house". See the following post.

Proper Usages of あおい | Japan Forum