Gender in Hindi

[Radhakrishna Warrier]

Most words in Hindi are from Sanskrit and Prakrit.   Over the centuries, words evolved from Prakrit to their modern Hindi form. Words came to Hindi from Sanskrit as tatsama and as tadbhava.  How is gender assigned to all these words that have either evolved from Prakrit or have come from Sanskrit in the tatsama or tadbhava forms?  Is the modern Hindi gender for a word same as in the original Sanskrit or Prakrit? If same, what happens to neuter gender words of Sanskrit and Prakrit, as Hindi does not have a neuter gender? (Gujarati and Marathi have neuter gender.) 

How did Hindi gender get assigned to non-Indic loan words?  For example, in the sentence “āp kī nazaroṃ ne samjhā pyār ke qābil mujhe (आप की नज़रों ने समझा प्यार के क़ाबिल मुझे)” the word nazar is used as feminine (hence the preposition used is “kī”) and qābil is treated as masculine (hence the preposition “ke”).  These words are originally from Arabic and entered Hindi/Urdu through Persian. Arabic does not assign gender to words that denote genderless objects or concepts.  Although Persian is an Indo-European language like Sanskrit and many of the present day north Indian languages, it (Persian) does not assign gender to words that denote genderless objects or concepts. (Persian, English, and Bengali are among a minority of Indo-European languages that do not assign gender to words for genderless objects or concepts.)  So, the question is how did words of Arabic, Persian or Turkic origin get their gender in Hindi/Urdu? 

Coming to modern times, how is gender assigned in Hindi to recent loan words from English?  What is the gender of “kaṃpyūṭar”, the Hindi tatsama from English “computer”? And how did this gender get assigned to this word? 

Regards,

Radhakrishna Warrier

[उत्कर्ष राजपूत]

The word "computer" is masculine in Hindi.

There are some common factors like comparative size, word ending, etc. which contribute to selecting the gender for a borrowed word. These factors may be overlapping and non-deterministic. Thus, the gender of a borrowed word initially varies from place to place and even person to person. For new borrowings, even a person may use different genders for the same word depending on the state of mind.

As an example, consider the word "command line (interface)". For my mind, sometimes it can be a "line", and on other times, it can be an "interface". When it seems to be an "interface", then it is masculine for me. When it is a "line", it is feminine. The word "line" is feminine in my native place, probably because one of its meaning is "पङ्क्ति", which is feminine.

As the word becomes popular, one gender for that word becomes dominant over the other and becomes the standard.

रविवार, 20 फ़रवरी 2022 को 4:19:08 am UTC+5:30 बजे Radhakrishna Warrier ने लिखा:

[Vichitra Thandava]

I was taught in school that only 50% of Hindi words can be attributed to Sanskrit.  That the other half comes from Persian, Arabic, Turkish, English....

Also, there is extensive evidence apparently that Urdu is also very much an Indian language like Hindi is and was not a Mughal camp language as is putatively understood. 

As far as I can tell, no one in India has Hindi or Urdu as the mother tongue or native vernacular though they may put that on official forms.

But yes, gender in Hindi can be very confusing 

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[Vichitra Thandava]

I took the liberty of sending your note around and I got this back:

"The assignment of gender in Hindustani is not arbitrary. It is based on phonemes. There is pattern to it, thats why native speakers are easily able to assign gender to neologism."

"Give me a list of English words. And, after looking at them, I might to be able to make the rules explicit. Right now, the phoneme pattern is abstruse even to me." 

So Mr Warrier,  please send a list iof words that you can come up with and let's see if my friend can sort out the rule.  Will be helpful for all, unless there are more learned in this forum who can educate. 

On Sun, Feb 20, 2022, 4:19 AM Radhakrishna Warrier <radwa...@hotmail.com> wrote:

[Vichitra Thandava]

OK, here is a website shared by my friend that deals with gender in Hindi 

https://rosemounts.org/a-guide-to-genders-and-their-grammar-in-the-hindi-language/

[L Srinivas]

> Coming to modern times, how is gender assigned in Hindi to recent loan words from English?

This is a very good question. For example, 'गाडी' and  'बस' (i.e., bus) are feminine but 'ट्रैक्टर' (i.e., tractor) is masculine.  Decades ago, I used to travel extensively in Punjab and Haryana - I never once heard a native speaker assign the  wrong gender to these nouns!

There's some method to it but it's a mystery to me.

Regards,

Srini