Hindustani grammar
Hindustani, the lingua franca of Northern India and Pakistan, has two standardised registers: Hindi and Urdu.
For example, in kahanā /kəɦ(ə)naː/ (कहना – کَہنا 'to say'), the /ɦ/ is surrounded on both sides by schwa, hence both the schwas will become fronted to short [ɛ], giving the pronunciation [kɛɦɛnaː].
and Affricate and Trill Hindustani distinguishes two genders (masculine and feminine), two noun types (count and non-count), two numbers (singular and plural), and three cases (nominative, oblique, and vocative).
A hyphen symbol (for the marked type-I) denotes change from the original termination to another (for example laṛkā to laṛke in the masculine singular oblique), whereas a plus sign (for the unmarked type-II) denotes an ending which should be added (seb to sebõ in the masculine plural oblique).
Indeclinable adjectives are completely invariable, and can end in either consonants or vowels (including ā and ī ).
[18] acchā acche acchī dāyā̃ dāyẽ dāyī̃ lāl Comparisons are made by using the instrumental postposition se (see below) the noun takes the oblique case and the combination of "noun + postposition" gets the instrumental case, and words like aur, zyādā ("more") and kam ("less") are added for relative comparisons.
The latter-most, often called a set of contracted forms, is used synonymously with the dative/accusative pronoun constructed from the oblique case by suffixing the dative/accusative postposition ko.
The personal pronouns (except the formal 2P āp) colloquially can also take the genitive oblique case before primary postpositions.
So, instead of mujhe or mujhko, the periphrastic construction mere ko is fairly commonly heard as a synonym to mujhe/mujhko in colloquial speech.
[38] Adverbs may be derived in ways such as the following — The Hindustani verbal system is largely structured around a combination of aspect and tense/mood.
Like the nominal system, the Hindustani verb involves successive layers of (inflectional) elements to the right of the lexical base.
[41] The perfective, though displaying a "number of irregularities and morphophonemic adjustments", is the simplest, being just the verb stem followed by the agreement vowel.
Tabled below on the left are the paradigms for adjectival concord (A), here only slightly different from that introduced previously: the f. pl.
All the personal compound forms of the verb karnā (to do) in all three aspects and all the grammatical moods are shown in the table below: The habitual, progressive, and imperfect aspectual participles can be used with copulas other than honā (to be) such as rahnā (to stay), ānā (to come), jānā (to go).
Notes Transitives are morphologically contrastive in Hindustani, leading to the existence of related verb sets divisible along such lines.
While the derivation of such forms shows patterns, they do reach a level of variegation so as to make it somewhat difficult to outline all-encompassing rules.
Finally, having to do with the manner of an occurrence, compounds verbs are mostly used with completed actions and imperatives, and much less with negatives, conjunctives, and contexts continuous or speculative.
2. jītnā 2. jīt cuknā "to have already won" The first three light verbs in the above table are the most common of auxiliaries, and the "least marked", or "lexically nearly colourless".
2. girnā "to fall down" → gir paṛnā "to collapse" with its independent/literal meaning sometimes showing through in a sense of upward movement.
[63] 2. dekhnā "to see" → dekh saknā "to be able to see" occurs with lenā and denā, meaning "to give/take (as a loan)", and with other appropriate verbs, showing an action performed beforehand.
[66] Finally, having to do with the manner of an occurrence, compounds verbs are mostly used with completed actions and imperatives, and much less with negatives, conjunctives, and contexts continuous or speculative.
In the case of a noun as the non-verbal element, it is treated syntactically as the verb's (direct) object (never taking the ko marker; governing agreement in perfective and infinitival constructions), and the semantic patient (or agent: see gālī khānā below) of the conjunct verbal expression is often expressed/marked syntactically as a genitive postposition (-kā ~ ke ~ kī) of the noun.
All English loan words are used by forming compound verbs in Hindi by using either honā (intransitive) or karnā (transitive).
Possession is reflected in Hindustani by the genitive marker kā (inflected appropriately) or the postposition ke pās ("near") and the verb honā.
Possible objects of possession fall into the following four main categories in Hindustani, merīmymā̃motherhai.there ismerī mā̃ hai.my mother {there is}I have a mother.uskīhisdotwoā̃khẽeyeshaĩ.there areuskī do ā̃khẽ haĩ.his two eyes {there are}He/She has two eyes.mereminedotwobaccechildrenhaĩ.there aremere do bacce haĩ.mine two children {there are}I have two children.merīminenazarvisionacchīgoodnahī̃nothai.ismerī nazar acchī nahī̃ hai.mine vision good not isMy vision is not good.Note: The verb honā can be translated as "to be", "to have/possess", "to exist" or "to happen" depending on the context.
are often used interchangeably when referring to pet dogs, with the sentence with the fundamental possession showing or having more emotional attachment.
The verb does not agree with either of the core arguments (agent and object), but is marked per default as third person masculine singular (calāyā hai).
The object is either in nominative case or accusative case, depending on animacy/definiteness laṛkāboy:NOMgāṛīcar:NOMcalātādrive:IMPF:MASC:SGhaibe:PRES:3.SGlaṛkā gāṛī calātā haiboy:NOM car:NOM drive:IMPF:MASC:SG be:PRES:3.SG'The boy drives a car.
Hindustani, like other Indo-Aryan languages, displays differential case marking on both subjects (DSM) and objects (DOM).
[80] Diachronically, differential argument marking developed very differently for subjects and objects, but became prevalent for both in the 17th century.
