Habitual Participles

In Hindi, there are so-called “habitual participles”.

There are several basic verbal aspects in Hindi: imperfective (a.k.a continuous), perfective, perfect, and habitual.

Likewise, Hindi participles have the same basic aspects: imperfective, perfect, and habitual.

As an example, what is the difference between the following two sentences?

सोमवार को प्रकाशित हुए अख़बार के अनुसार, प्रधान मंत्री अगले हफ़्ते घोषणा करेंगे – “According to a newspaper published on Monday, the prime minister will make an announcement next week”

सोमवार को प्रकाशित होने वाले अख़बार के अनुसार, प्रधान मंत्री अगले हफ़्ते घोषणा करेंगे – “According to a newspaper published on Monday, the prime minister will make an announcement next week”

In English, both sentences are translated the same way. So what is the difference between the perfect participle (हुए) and the habitual participle (होने वाले)? The difference is that a perfect participle indicates a state resulting from some completed action, whereas the habitual participle indicates a general or regular action. In other words, we could translate the difference as follows:

सोमवार को प्रकाशित हुए अख़बार के अनुसार, प्रधान मंत्री अगले हफ़्ते घोषणा करेंगे – “According to a newspaper that was published on Monday, the prime minister will make an announcement next week”

सोमवार को प्रकाशित होने वाले अख़बार के अनुसार, प्रधान मंत्री अगले हफ़्ते घोषणा करेंगे – “According to a newspaper that is published on every Monday, the prime minister will make an announcement next week”

In this example, the habitual participle of an intransitive verb (होना) was used.

The general form of habitual participles is:

[masculine singular oblique infinitive of the main verb] [form of वाला]

The form of वाला inflects according to the word it modifies.

Habitual participles can be used with transitive verbs too:

भारतीय लोग हिंदी सिखने वाले लोगों के प्रति बहुत दयालु है – “Indians are very kind to people who are learning Hindi”. In this example, the participle was used substantively.

दुसरे लोगों की शिकायत करने वाले लोगों को पहले अपनी कमियां देखनी चाहिए – “People who criticize others should first consider their own faults”.

Habitual participles are often concise replacements for relative clauses.

Habitual participles can be used in the passive voice too:

हिंदी भारत की सबसे अधिक बोली जाने वाली भाषा है – “Hindi is India’s most widely spoken language”.

In this example, we see that passive habitual participles are formed as follows:

[perfect participle of the main verb] [जाने] [form of वाला]

If we think of [perfect participle of the main verb] + [जाने] as a “passive infinitive”, then we can consider passive habitual participles to simply be:

[masculine singular oblique passive infinitive of main verb] [form of वाला]

In the example sentence, the participle बोली जाने वाली indicates that Hindi is spoken habitually, generally, etc.