Agreement in Hindi
Agreement is a phenomenon in languages, in which the form or the usage of one word or phrase
changes with the change in the form of another word or phrase in the sentence. This paper
discusses Agreement in the Hindi language and how it differs from the Agreement in the English
language. Agreement can be discussed at various levels for example number, gender and tense etc.
Agreement based on Number
Agreement based on grammatical number majorly occurs between verb and subject, as in the case
of grammatical person discussed above. There are specific verb forms for first person singular,
second person plural and so on. For Example:
म भारतीय हूँ (1st person singular) and हम भारतीय ह ( 1st person plural).
Which is quite similar to verb-subject Agreement in English which, for this example roughly
translates to:
I am an Indian(1st person singular) and We are Indians(1st person plural).
As visible in the example above, articles like “a”, “an” and “the” do not have counterparts in
Hindi.
One big contrast between Hindi and English agreement rules based on number is that verbs in
hindi depict plurality of the subject when used in past or future tense.
For Example:
“Ram is coming here.” is “ राम यहाँ आ रहा है । “ . Here, verbs in both the languages indicate that
the subject is singular.
But in the following example, verb in Hindi indicate that the subject is plural, whereas the verb in
English indicates no such information:
“Ram and Shyam came here yesterday.”“came here”, may be used for plural as well as singular.
राम और याम कल यहाँ आये थे। “आये थे” infers that the subject is a plural as “आया था “ should be
used where the subject is singular.
Agreement based on Person
Agreement based on grammatical person is found mostly between verb and subject,as it is the case in
English too.
Verbs in hindi have different forms when used with different persons. For example:
“म भारतीय हूँ।” , “तम
ु भारतीय हो।” and ” र ाम भारतीय है ।” have three different forms of the verb,
changing with the change in the person of the subject. Correspondingly, the english translations for the
same sentences would be:
“I am an Indian.”, “ You are an Indian.” and “ Ram is an Indian.” here too, we can observe three
different forms of the verb changing with change in the person of subject.
But in more sentences with future tenses like:
“म खाना पकाऊँगा।”, “तम
ु खाना पकाओगे।” and “राम खाना पकायेगा।” hindi has three different forms
of the verb whereas the English translation will have the verb “will cook” in all three cases. Sentences
in past tense don’t have different verbs which is similar to the case in English.
Agreement based on Gender
Agreement based on Gender in Hindi occurs, unlike English between Subject and the verb, and
like English, pronouns and the subject. In Hindi, unlike english, grammatical genders of
non-living things exist and the translations of pronouns like his and her which are उसक /उसका
signify the gender of the thing in the context and no the person to whom the thing belongs.
There is a glaring difference between the change in the forms of pronouns with the change in the
grammatical genders of nouns which can be clearly observed in the following example:
“Ram drove his car”. Is र ाम ने उसक गाडी चलायी। But the sentence “Ram cleaned his room.” is
राम ने उसका कमरा साफ़ कया।. Here, pronouns “his” refer to the gender of Ram in both sentences,
but the Hindi pronouns refer to the grammatical gender of the things that are the car and the room.
Verbs in Hindi have different forms depending on the gender of the subject, which is not the case
with English. E.g.:
“Sita eats food.” Translates to: सीता खाना खाती है । and “Ram eats food” translates to:
राम खाना खाता है । Here, खाती है and ख
ाता है are changed into one another because of the gender of
the person performing the verb.
Agreement based on Tense
Agreement based on tense is observed between the tense and the form of the verb used in the
sentence. The following example demonstrates the change in the form of the verb with the change
in the tense of the sentence:
राम कताब पढता है । and राम कताब पढता था।
One can safely say that agreement rules based on differences in tense are fairly simple in Hindi
when compared with many other languages.
Given below is another example which illustrates the difference between the agreement when the
subject is 1st person and the tense changes from past to future.
म खाना खा रहा था । and म खाना खाऊंगा। Which are the translations for “I was eating food” and “I
will eat food.”.
Agreement based on Voice
The last category under which the paper discusses the Agreement in Hindi is the voice, i.e Active
voice or Passive voice. The active voice describes a sentence where the subject performs the
action stated by the verb whereas In the passive voice, however, the subject is no longer
performing the action of the verb. This agreement in hindi is quite similar to that in English, the
phrase “के वारा” replace the english word “by” in the passive forms of a sentence.
For example:
The passive voice for ” ेया मझ
ु े घर भेज रह है ।” is “मझ
ु े ेया के वारा घर भेजा जा रहा है ।” Both
these sentences are translations for “Shreya sent me home.” and “I was sent home by Shreya.”
respectively.
Using the above discussion, we can safely conclude that Hindi and English have vast number of
differences in their Agreements, but there are a lot of similarities too.
