Gender agreement in Hindi

I was telling the story that I blogged about in my previous post to someone in Guwahati. When I got to the part where I was saying 'I don't understand Hindi', I told her I'd said:

मुझ को हिन्दि नहिँ आती है।
mujh ko hindi nahiin aatii hai.
(lit. 'To me Hindi does not come').

She burst into laughter and exclaimed, "But you're not a woman!"

This raised a rather interesting linguistic question for me. The issue here was that I had used the feminine participle of the verb 'to come': आती aatii where she had expected the masculine singular form आता aataa.

Now, what I'd learnt in my few weeks of Hindi lessons from a tutor from Lucknow was that in Hindi, all nouns have grammatical gender (like other Indo-European languages such as French and Russian) and that verbs agree with their subject in gender and number. In French, for instance, some verbs agree with their subject for number and gender in the passé composé 'compound past tense', e.g. Le jour de gloire est arrivé. 'The day of glory has come', but Les pluies sont arrivées. 'The rains have come' because jour 'day' is masculine and singular while pluies 'rains' is feminine and plural. (Note that the difference is only visible in the written language.)

In a clause like mujh ko hindi nahiin aatii hai, the grammatical subject is actually hindi, which I am told is a feminine noun. The form of the 1st person singular mujh ko has an oblique case, which translates to something like 'to me'. Therefore, what I was doing was making the verb agree in gender with the noun in subject position. However, I've been told that outside the main Hindi speaking regions of Uttar Pradesh (including Lucknow where my  tutor was from), and outside what is prescribed as 'grammatically correct' Hindi, subject-verb agreement is not as strict as how I'd applied it.

It's also obvious from my friend's reaction that the verb needed to agree with the 1st person singular mujh ko (who is male), even though morphologically it was marked for the oblique case.

This is not to say that what I had said was wrong, or that my friend was wrong, it's just that there are various varieties (and registers) of Hindi that are spoken across India. In some varieties, agreement of the kind I used is expected, but in others, it sounds either pretentious or just plain silly!

Happy Deepavali / Diwali

To all Hindus, Happy Deepavali / இனிய தீபாவளி நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள் (iniya deepavali nalvazhthukkal). It's a public holiday here in Singapore. Unlike last year when I was really getting into the spirit of the Nepali counterpart Tihar (see here), this year there won't be any such cultural immersion for me. However, I did drop by Little India here in Singapore yesterday looking for sweets, which was a big mistake, given the last minute rush for sweets and other items for pooja / puja.

The majority of Singaporean Indians are Tamil, and the Tamil language is one of the official languages of Singapore, though sadly, it's usually the forgotten child out of the four - the only Tamil I ever paid attention to while growing up in Singapore was vannakkam, which I'd often hear at the end of the Tamil news. Also, there was never any motivation for me to learn Tamil, given that we spoke English at home, I had to learn Mandarin in school and Malay would've been my next choice since my parents speak Malay.

In any case, it's not surprising that you find signs like this one in Tamil (which reads iniya deepavali nalvazhthukkal):

But nowadays, it's also not uncommon to see signs in Hindi as well, like this one which reads: शुभ दिवाली (shubh diwālī).

A note about the etymology of the Hindi diwālī (the use of the macron indicates a long vowel): many websites I've seen say that the Hindi is a 'contraction' of the Sanskrit दीपावली dīpāvalī, a compound of दीपा dīpā 'lamp' and avalī अवली 'row'. I'm certain linguists have already worked out the exact sound changes - I just haven't spent the time doing the research, but I thought I'd have a go at explaining why it's called diwālī in Hindi, but deepavali in Tamil.

First of all, Tamil தீபாவளி deepavali  (or more precisely, tīpāvaļi since Tamil does not make a meaningful contrast between the sounds d and t) has clearly preserved the number of syllables of the original word. I'm assuming here that Tamil, probably Middle Tamil, borrowed the term from Sanskrit.

In contrast, if we assume that Hindi  दिवाली diwālī is ultimately from Sanskrit दीपावली dīpāvalī, the easiest way to explain the change would be to say that the Hindi form has undergone 'lenition', a common sound change whereby consonants 'weakened' in some way, particularly when they are surrounded by two vowels. We see such lenition in most varieties of English, e.g. the t in words like water and city are rarely pronounced like the t in words like term and tea: instead of a strongly aspirated stop [t^h], speakers often just produce a very quick tap of the tongue.

One common sound change pathway is: [p] > [b] > [v] > [ʋ] (a sound similar to [w]) > nothing. If you practise making these sounds, you'll notice that all of them involve using the lips, or at least part of the lips. Speakers of Singlish (or if you listen to the video in my previous post) will notice that the word never is often pronounced neh, with no [v] sound in the middle of the word. This is an example of such lenition.

It is therefore not difficult to see how the original [v] sound in a word like dīpāvalī could be completed deleted, while the [p] sound could lenite to [b] and then to [ʋ] (written as 'w' in transliterations of Hindi).

Vowels: Does /j/ + /a/ = /æ/ ?

This is something that has been bugging me a little bit since I was in Nepal back in October last year. It concerns the orthographic representation of the English vowel /æ/ in words like taxi /tæksi/ when they are borrowed into Nepali.

The word for taxi in Nepali is ट्याक्सि, which transliterated gives Tyaaksi, where T represents a voiceless unaspirated retroflex stop (the tip of the tongue is slightly further back than when you produce a normal alveolar 't' sound in English). The appearance of the retroflex is not surprising here as English alveolar stops are usually borrowed into Indic languages like Nepali and Hindi as retroflex stops. (Assamese is the exception here as it has lost its retroflex stop series.)

The Nepali spelling suggests that the word is pronounced /ʈjaksi/ (/j/ represents the sound 'y'). My friend Sara insisted that Nepali speakers would palatalise (produce a particular speech sound while simultaneously raising the body of the tongue towards the roof of the mouth) the first consonant when saying the word and her theory was that they were trying to follow the American pronunciation of the word 'taxi'. (Correct me if I got this wrong Sara.)

I wasn't convinced with that explanation. For one thing, I would often hear speakers say something closer to /ʈɛksi/, without palatalising the first consonant and with the vowel /ɛ/, which is much more similar to /æ/. I also didn't see why Nepali would borrow English /t/ as a palatalised retroflex stop /ʈj/ since English /t/ isn't palatalised in this context. Also, I thought it counterintuitive that speakers would follow an American English pronunciation to guide their spelling, given the influence of British English across the Indian sub-continent.

Instead, my theory was that the combination of the letters 'y' and 'a' (या) represent the vowel /æ/ (or a close approximation like /ɛ/) and are not pronounced like /ja/. Unfortunately, other things came up (like 2 months in Nagaland), and I wasn't able to get more evidence to support my hypothesis.

Then today on the bus back to the Guwahati University Guest House, I found myself staring at the sign for the Volkswagen showroom while we were stuck in traffic. While I'm not as familiar with the Assamese script, the main thing I noticed was that the syllable corresponding to 'wa' in Volkswagen was written as ওয়া, which would be transliterated as 'oya'. Now, I'm assuming that the transliteration of Volkswagen in the Assamese script is based on the English pronunciation of the word and not the German one - the presence of 'o' in 'oya' suggests that it is trying to approximate /w/, not /v/. If this is true, then it provides evidence from another Indic language that a combination of the letters 'y' and 'a' are used to represent the English /æ/, as in 'wagon' /wægən/, or a close approximation of that sound.

I have to take a photo of that Volkswagen sign next time I pass by. Once I do and have evidence that Assamese does in fact use 'ya' to represent /æ/, I might try and confirm that Nepali uses the same strategy to represent this vowel.

(Note: standard Hindi avoids this problem altogether because it has the vowel /ɛ/ in its phoneme inventory, which is close to /æ/. It is often transliterated as 'ai' even though it is not a diphthong, e.g. in टैक्सी Taiksii 'taxi'. Also, the vowel in Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif's last name is not pronounced as a diphthong in standard Hindi.)

Counting in Indic languages

To commemorate my 100th post on this blog (yes, it's been a hundred) and the fact that I'm learning some Assamese here in Guwahati, I thought I'd talk about learning to count in an Indic language - basically any one of the many Indo-European languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent, including Hindi, Bengali, Nepali and Assamese.

Now I'm not talking about their numeral systems, since most of us use a derivation of the Hindu or Hindu-Arabic numeral system on a daily basis, which is a decimal system that uses only 10 digits from 0 to 9. What I'm talking about are the names for the numbers in these languages.

Now non-native speakers learning to count in English from 1 to 100, technically only need to memorise the names of the numbers from 1 to 20, then every multiple of 10 till 100. That's because after 20, we simply say 20 'twenty' and 1 'one' to get 21 'twenty one'; 20 'twenty' and 2 'two' to get 22 'twenty two' and so on. However, they still need to learn what 11-19 are since we don't say 'ten one' for 11, or 'ten two' for 12. They also need to learn the names for the multiples of 10 since these are not entirely regular - we don't say 'three-ty' for 30 or 'five-ty' for 50. (Sure, you might say there's a pattern with 40 and 60-90, but it's not as regular as say, 21-29.)

What non-native speakers find learning to count in Indic languages is that while there are some patterns like the kind you find from 60 'sixty' to 90 'ninety' in English, most of the time it seems like you just have to memorise the name of every single number from 1 to 100.

For instance, if we look at 5, 15, 25, 35 ... 85, 95 in Hindi:

5 पाँच paaNch (N indicates nasalisation on the preceding vowel)
15 पन्द्रह pandrah
25 पच्चीस pachchiis          (20 is बीस biis)
35 पैंतीस paiNtiis              (30 is तीस tiis)
45 पैंतालीस paiNtaaliis      (40 is चालीस chaaliis)
55 पचपन pachapan          (50 is पचास pachaas)
65 पैंसठ paiNsaTh             (60 is साठ saaTh)
75 पचहत्तर pachahattara     (70 is सत्तर sattara)
85 पचासी pachaasii            (80 is अस्सी assii)
95 पंचानबे paNchaanabe     (90 is नब्बे nabbe)

You can sort of see a pattern, but it's not quite possible to analyse each form morphologically and tease out the part that means 'five units'. Goodness also knows when to decide when to nasalise the vowel or not. Also, look at the words for 25 (pachchiis) and 50 (pachaas) - I always get their Nepali counterparts mixed up.

Assamese isn't much different. Here're the numbers from 1-12 in Assamese - which is as far as I'll go for now since it'll allow me to tell the time. I'll probably get up to 31 so I can give dates, and also learn a few more multiples of 10.

1 এক ek
2 দুই dui
3 তিনি tini
4 চাৰি sari
5 পাঁচ pans [pãs]
6 ছয় sôy [sɔj]
7 সাত xaat
8 আঠ aath
9 ন nô [nɔ]
10 দহ dôh
11 এঘাৰ egharô
12 বাৰ barô

When I come up with a good way to memorise the numbers from 0 to 100 in such languages I'll let you know. In the meantime, thank goodness people here in Guwahati also use English numbers.