Hello!
For this week's learning journal, we're talking about linguistic aspects of Hindi.
Hindi from a linguistic standpoint redefines the word complex. I shall isolate a single aspect, gender structure to explain why. Gender structure varies based on the tense one is talking in along with the gender of the person speaking. I believe that this effect is called 'split egativity' in linguistics. Let's take a pretty simple sentence in English and demonstrate how it can be different based on the gender of the person speaking and also the tense:
Consider the phrase 'I play with toys'.
If a boy were to say this phrase, it would be: main khilone ke saath khelta hun. The gender of the verb agrees with the subject here (which is male). If a girl were to say the same sentence, she'd saymain khilone ke saath khelti hun. Notice that the verb has changed to reflect her gender.
Now, if we were to say this same sentence in the past tense, both the boy and the girl would say maineh khilone ke saath khela. In the past tense, the gender of the verb follows the gender of the object (the toy, khilone, which is male). This can be extremely confusing to someone learning (or relearning the language in my case).
During my first few lessons with my language partner, I kept fumbling with gender structure, but after learning this simple rule, gender structure in Hindi doesn't seem all that confusing...until I start trying to remember this rule during a conversation :) Practice makes perfect as they say!
Let me drive home my earlier point about the confusing nature of Hindi by telling you that the word for yesterday and tomorrow are the same in Hindi! Indians are quite casual about time, so we tend to not be very particular about tardiness. When someone says that they will be arriving in 5 minutes, they may not have even left their house. This may be really confusing to someone who isn't Indian, but it is something one adjusts to while living in India. You usually account for ten minutes plus the time someone tells you. This is a reflection of how culture has affected how people talk about time in Hindi.
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