Habitual Participles

Habitual participles indicate habitual actions.

Habitual participles have the same form as future participles:

[masculine singular oblique form of an infinitive|form of वाला]

However, the difference is the context:

रोनेवाला बच्चा – “The (habitually) crying baby boy” / “The boy who always cries”

2 replies on “Habitual Participles”

Hello again, fantastic blog.

How would you deal with passive in this case? Say I want to say “the food habitually cooked by me tastes nice”, I could say it with a correlative pronoun “खाना जो मैं पकाता हूँ, अच्छा लगता है”, but could I say it with a habitual participle? I have a feeling it’s no from your example, because the noun receiving the adjectival participle must be the subject of the action, am I right?

Sincerely.

Good question. Hindi speakers tend to avoid the passive voice unless it is necessary. So, in your example sentence, a native speaker would most likely say “मैं जो खाना पकाता हूँ इसका स्वाद अच्छा है”, i.e. “the food I cook tastes nice”. The syntax of relative pronouns is different in Hindi than in English. In English, relative clauses are often parenthetical, e.g. “the food (that I cook) tastes good”. In Hindi, relative pronouns are correlative, i.e. they come in pairs, e.g. “जो … वह = (इस)” in the example sentence. The relative pronoun often goes right before the word it modifies, which is different than English, where the relative pronoun goes after the word it modifies; other word orders are possible, but less common. Hindi speakers also tend to use participles for passive sentences. So, a native speaker might prefer to say “मेरे द्वारा पकाये जाने वाले खाने का स्वाद अच्छा है”. This is a bit closer to English – it is literally “the cooked-by-me-food tastes good”. Now, to answer your question: it is certainly possible to combine the passive voice and a habitual verb; for instance, we could say “जो खाना वहां पकाया जाता है इसका स्वाद अच्छा है”. This is grammatically correct; however, it is not idiomatic Hindi. I think most speakers would say something like “वहां पकाये जाने वाले खाने का स्वाद अच्छा है”. Ask your Hindi-speaking acquaintance if she agrees.

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