Meme #2 - Hindi grammar
Dec. 2nd, 2014 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven"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.
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.
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no subject
on 2014-12-02 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:12 pm (UTC)ONE DAY we will get around to watching Three Idiots together and you will explain all the language to me and it will be amazing \o/
no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:24 pm (UTC)(Yes Three Idiots yes! Maybe we should actually set a DATE and BUY POPCORN.)
no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:41 pm (UTC)(That is a GOOD PLAN. We can discuss on Saturday!)
no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-02 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 04:16 am (UTC)I was. And then I cussed at her because it inevitably moved Hindi back to the top of the language stack. Oops. :D
no subject
on 2014-12-03 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 06:24 pm (UTC)Linguists say that there are three things, Subject, Object, and Agent (where Agent is the single argument of an intransitive, like, hmm, "she" in "she ran."). In a nom-acc system, the two things that pattern together are Subjects and Agents -- those two things both get the same case marking, and they're the things that the verb agrees with. In an ergative-absolutive system, the two things that pattern together are Objects and Agents.
What happens in an erg-abs system is exactly what you've described for the perfect in Hindi. When you say that you say "I read a book" and "read" is feminine because "book" is feminine, this is exactly an erg-abs system. The verb agrees with the object. The person reading the book gets a special case (the ergative). In, like, the platonic ideal of an erg-abs system, what happens is that the agents of intransitives should get absolutive case (and the verb should presumably agree with them -- but it looks like it doesn't in Hindi? it looks like the absolutive case might not exist there, but the ergative does? hmm.) and that subjects of transitives should get ergative case and the verb shouldn't agree with them (it agrees with the object).
Anyway, the prototypical erg-abs system would give you a pattern like this:
she-ABS ran.
she-ERG read the book-ABS.
Wikipedia tells me that the situation in Hindi is a little more complicated, and furthermore that what you've got in Hindi is called "split ergativity," which basically means that Hindi is not an ergative language all the time, only in some situations -- like how you said this happens in the perfect. The only "true" ergative language I have ever heard of, where it is ergative 100% of the time, is Basque.
The wiki article on ergative-absolutive languages probably does a better job than I just did.
no subject
on 2014-12-03 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 08:34 pm (UTC)I see why this would make it difficult to learn, though; it seems um, surprising.
no subject
on 2014-12-03 05:28 pm (UTC)I like that thing when you can just look at a sentence and *see* all the rules and relationships in technicolour. Much more pleasing than having to translate it into words. That was Greek, more than 20 years ago.
no subject
on 2014-12-03 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-03 05:51 pm (UTC)Anyway, very interesting—and it makes me want to learn Hindi! My to-learn list is getting long…
no subject
on 2014-12-03 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-06 07:58 pm (UTC)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.
That's not Past Perfect. That's simple past. Rough guide to which is which below.
Past simple = I ran, I went, I listened, I did (used for general past and general truths-- the Romans spoke Latin)
Past Perfect = I had run, I had been, I had listened, I had done (used for actions completed in the past, often as a previous action in a narrative: She had spoken to me before getting married).
Present perfect = I have run, I have been, I have listened, I have done (used for actions completed in the present-- so we often use it describing things we did in the past, but that are done/completed now - I have spoken to you about this before!).
Past continuous/progressive = I was running, I was being, I was listening, I was doing (used for ongoing actions that took place in the past. I was speaking with my mother when it happened).
And for bonus: Past perfect continuous = I had been going, I had been listening.... used for bloody awkward narrative structures, mostly. I had been speaking with my father).
English is actually weird not in having multiple forms of past tense (I listen, I do listen, I am listening) as well as past.
no subject
on 2014-12-07 04:12 pm (UTC)This was most interesting, I had to go look for a couple more grammar explanations because it seemed too complicated for me since I know nothing about Hindi but now that
no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-02 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-12-04 01:26 am (UTC)