The mysterious ‘ne’

I first became interested in languages when I began learning French in 9th standard, at the age of 13. Language is instinctive in us, we never have to consciously make an effort to construct words and phrases and sentences. As long as we don’t try to learn a new language, that is. Learning French gave me the first glimpse into the wonderful (and mind-boggling!) complexity of human language. I began to pay closer attention to the way I speak, analysing every word and sentence I speak or hear. One of the first curiosities that piqued my interest was the mysterious ne in Hindi. Here are two examples to display this mysterious word.

मैं किताब लिखता हूँ।
ma͠i kitāb likhtā hū̃
I write a book.

मैंने किताब लिखी।
ma͠i ne kitāb likhī 
I wrote a book.

You see, the translations in English are simple. To convert the sentence from present to past tense, you simply convert the present tense form of the verb, “write”, to past tense, “wrote”. (By the way, I initially planned on using the verb “read”, but that is spelled the same in both tenses in English, so…) But in Hindi, as you see, not only does this mysterious ने, or ne, appear out of thin air, but the verb, लिखी likhī, is now in the feminine form! The masculine form of the same verb would be लिखा likhā, and last I checked I was still a man. Why am I using the feminine form of the verb then?

These questions made a 13-year old boy very curious and excited. I asked my parents, friends, and teachers; nobody knew. I kept getting one answer: “That’s just how it is”. No one for accepting such a cop out, I kept looking. I eventually forgot about it, until I finally learnt and, more importantly, understood, the answer years later, by which point I had learnt much more about linguistics and morphosyntax. If that second word scares you, it should; it is very, very confusing for a beginner, Wikipedia notwithstanding. I didn’t understand it for years, myself. But here I’ll try to explain why Hindi inserts the weird ne and converts the gender of the verb, in as simple language as possible.

To explain, I will start with verbs. I’m assuming the reader is familiar with verbs: ‘action words’, basically. For our purposes, verbs are of two types: ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’. If you remember what these are from your days in school reading Wren and Martin, great! Skip the following paragraph. Otherwise, here’s a catch-up for you. Consider the following sentences:

I eat the food.
You write the book.
We see the man.
He hears the sound.

There is one thing common in all of them. There are ‘doers’ to the action: I, you, we, and he. And there is the ‘doee’, or the ‘experiencer’ of the action: the food, the book, the man, and the sound. Each of these four verbs involve two entities: the doer, and the experiencer. Compare that to these four sentences:

I sleep.
We fall.
You walk.
They run.  

In these four verbs, there is space for only one entity: the sole entity performing the action. Can someone run something else, or walk something else? Well, yes, in English it turns out that you can, but ‘walking something else’ and ‘yourself walking’ are different things, aren’t they? Think about it, you’d use different verbs in Hindi for them! Why they’re described with the same verb in English is a story for another day, but quite related to the topic I’m explaining at the moment.

Anyway, in the first example, verbs could take both a doer and an experiencer. Such verbs are transitive verbs. In the second example, the verbs could only take one single sole entity. Such verbs are intransitive. This difference is key to understanding the ne.

Now, let’s move onto the entities that are involved in the action of the verb. In English, we say:

I saw him.
I sleep.
He heard me.  

and not:

Me saw he.
Me sleep.
Him heard I.

Why? Do you see a trend here? The trend is that we treat the sole entity of an intransitive verb, in the same way as we treat the doer of a transitive verb. In “I saw him”, I is the doer. In “I sleep”, I is the sole entity of the action. If you think a bit, doing an action upon something else, and being the sole entity of the action, are quite different. Yet, in English, we treat them the same, and use the same form of the pronoun. We treat the experiencer of the transitive verb differently: “I saw him“, “He heard me“, and not “I saw he“, and “He heard I“.

And that is also what we do in Hindi, but only in the present tense.

मौं किताब लिखता हूँ।
ma͠i kitāb likhtā hū̃
I write a book. 

मौं सोता हूँ।
ma͠i sotā hū̃ 
I sleep.

The doer of the transitive verb, and the the sole entity of the intransitive, are both treated in the same way: मौं ma͠i . The experiencer, किताब kitāb, is treated differently. But what happens when we move to the past tense?

  
मैंने किताब लिखी।
ma͠ine kitāb likhī 
I wrote a book.
 
मौं सोया।
ma͠i soyā 
I slept.

किताब फटी। 
kitāb phaṭī 
The book tore.

Now, we finally come to the mysterious ne! A very weird thing (well, not that weird, but anyway…) is that in the past tense in Hindi, the doer of the transitive verb, मैंने ma͠ine, is not treated the same way as the sole entity of the intransitive verb, मैं ma͠i. For the doer, the extra ne is added. Meanwhile, the experiencer of the transitive verb, and the sole entity of the intransitive verb, are treated the same: किताब kitāb. What does this mean?

It means that, while in the present tense in Hindi, the sole experience of an intransitive verb and the doer of a transitive verb are treated the same way and the experiencer of a transitive verb is different, in the past tense instead, the sole entity of the intransitive verb and the experiencer of the transitive verb are treated the same way, and it is the doer of the transitive verb that is differently treated.

That is why, in the first transitive sentence, not only do you have to add ne to the doer, to mark that this is a doer of a transitive sentence in a different way, you also have to agree the verb in the feminine gender, as the word किताब kitāb in Hindi is feminine. Why? Because this word is the experiencer, and the experiencer of a transitive verb is the same as the sole entity of an intransitive verb, but only in the past tense!

This system, where the sole entity is the same as the experiencer, and the doer is different, is called the Ergative-Absolutive Morphosyntactic Alignment (remember the word morphosyntax in the beginning?). It contrasts with the usual “sole entity = doer & experiencer being different” system of the Nominative-Accusative Alignment. Since Hindi only has the Ergative-Absolutive alignment in the past tense, Hindi has what is called split-ergativiy. AKA, ergativity only in one section of the language, i.e., only in the past tense. Well, it is really the entire perfective aspect, but that’s going a bit too technical there.

Anyway, split-ergativity doesn’t exist in a whole lot of languages in the world. Some other languages (other than Hindi and Urdu, that is, which are basically the same language, and let’s not get into that right now) which have this feature include Pashto, which is spoken in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Sorani, a variety of Kurdish spoken in Iraq. Several other languages have complete ergativity throughout the language, such as Basque (spoken in Spain and France), Tibetian (spoken in, well, Tibet) and the Mayan languages (spoken in Central America). So Hindi is in quite the unique club for having split-ergativity as a feature.

To summarize the post, in Hindi, in the past tense, the sole entity of a transitive verb is treated in the same way as the experiencer of an intransitive verb, and the doer of the transitive verb is treated grammatically differently. Why is it so? That is to do with how Hindi evolved from Sanskrit and the innovations it adopted along the way, and is another story for another day. I’ve also cut down on a lot of details and jargon to make this post as accessible to the layman as I can. For now, just know that the ne is one of the things that makes Hindi very, very unique.

Feedback on the post, especially on how accessible you found it if you were a layperson, would be very helpful.