Meme #2 - Hindi grammar

"Anything you might want to share about languages would make me very happy," says falena, my favourite polyglot.

Now, last year I wrote quite a bit about languages in the abstract, which ones I speak and learn, and what they all mean to me, so this year, my friends, we shall address the technicalities. We shall address GRAMMAR. (I love grammar. Okay, maybe not when actually learning it in the trenches? But I love the idea of grammar – how it encodes meaning, particularly, and what it presupposes as necessary for meaning. I am a giant language nerd news at eleven.)

For no particular reason other than the fact I’m proud I finally got it straight, let’s deal with the past perfect tense in Hindi. This is a tense used about as commonly as the equivalent English tense, and it’s always translated straightforwardly into the English past perfect – “I ran”, “They fell”, “We listened patiently to Iona explain Hindi grammar to us for no particular reason”, etc.

Okay! So taken first of all, it’s quite simple. “To be” is very irregular, of course; Hindi doesn’t have “to have”; but “to go”, while irregular, does follow the usual pattern in the past tense. So!

I went – मेँ गयी, mein gayin. (I say this, because I identify as female; if I identified as male it would be मेँ गया, mein gaya.) I believe, but do not know for sure, that non-binary people often use the plural first person)
You went (formal, plural) – आप गए, aap gaye.
He, she, it went – वह गयी or गए, woh gayin or gaya.
We went – हम गए, hum gaye.

…etc. There are only three forms for each verb – fem singular, masc singular, and plural.

However, this is the hard part. The verb “to go” is intransitive. I tend to understand this with the thought that I can just go (or sleep, or take a shower, or fall, or laugh, or dance), without involving any other object or person. But करना (kurna - to do_, खरीदना (karidhna - to buy) पढ़ना (parna - to read) – require you to do, buy, read, things. They’re transitive.

You say, therefore: मैं ने किताब पढ़ी, mai ne kitab parhi. पढ़ी, parhi, is taking the feminine singular form, but not because of me, because of the book. “किताब" (kitab) is a feminine noun, in the singular. If I read lots of books today, I would say: मैं ने किताबे पढ़ीं, mai ne kitabe parhiin, again taking the verb form from the object, not from me. ("ने" doesn’t mean anything: it’s just something you throw in to show this is a transitive verb.)

Similarly, if it were you (lots of you) who read a book today – let’s assume you all loved it and passed it around like a relay baton - it would be, आप ने किताब पढ़ी, ap ne kitab parhi. If you all read a book each, so books should be in the plural, आप ने किताबे पढ़ीं, ap ne kitabe parhin.

If you all read today, but I don’t know what you read – maybe you read a book, किताब, kitab, but maybe you read a magazine, or maybe you read fanfic, or maybe you walked up and down the street reading roadsigns – then it’s आप ने पढ़ा, ap ne parha. “पढ़ा” there takes the masculine form as the default, because it ought to agree with something but we actually don’t know what.

(Interestingly, that’s idiomatic. आप ने पढ़ा, without anything specified, usually means not that you read, but that you studied. I’ve always wondered if this is why you read for your degree at Oxford and Cambridge, rather than study for it. पढ़ना means to read and लेखन means to write – someone who is पढ़ा-लिखा, which is an adjective, is literate in both senses of the English word. It can mean someone who can read and write, or someone who is well-educated and learned.)

There are some verbs – not many! – which have irregular participles. There’s “to be” and “to go” and “to do”, of course. There’s a handful of others which have irregular participles because the regular ones would be very difficult to pronounce. (शराब, alcohol, is feminine, and पीने, pina, is to drink. But it isn’t, मैं ने शराब पीयीं, main ne sharaabi piyin – it’s plain old, मैं ने शराब पी, mai ne sharaabi pi, so you can actually say it.) And there are three more verbs, मिलना (milna, to meet), लेना (lena, to bring) and भूलना (bhulna, to forget) which should be transitive but aren’t, so instead of मैं ने कुछ भुला, main ne kuch bhula, it’s मैं कुछ भूली, mai kuch buli – I forgot something, and I am female so भूलना (bhulna) agrees with me rather than the something I forgot. Otherwise, that's it - and surprisingly regular and logical it is, too.

I suspect this was possibly not utterly scintillating for people who don't like grammar? But there we go.