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- "मेरी दादी सड़क पर बैठी हैं ।"
18 Comments
Well, that particular grandmother doesn't seem to be in a very safe situation in any case...
Shouldn't this say: My grandmother sits on the road...sitting would be: bait rahi hai.....right?
'My grandmother sits on the road' would be मेरी दादी सड़क पर बैठती हैं।
मेरी दादी सड़क पर बैठ रही हैं is 'My grandmother is sitting down on the road' as in she is in the process of sitting down
मेरी दादी सड़क पर बैठी हैं is 'My grandmother is sitting on the road' as in she is seated
It's a weird sentence to be sure but not incomprehensible.
Imagine you're driving on a highway. You stop and get out of the car. You sit down right there. Voilà, you're sitting on a road now. Not very smart, I know but it is what it is.
253
Thanks, in my variety of English at least "on the road" tends to mean "by the side of the road" (apart from the common idiomatic interpretation of "to be travelling").
Sounds like in my dialect this Hindi sentence means "sitting in the road" :)
- 1790
Hi Adam,
There is at least one instance when this expression looks valid:
In our case, maybe someone wanted to get rid of grandma or use her as a decoy !!-( Unfortunately, some elderly people would do that on their own...
- 253
Not saying this is impossible in every English dialect. (I assume it's possible in Indian English for the obvious reasons!) But when I came upon this sentence "in the road," which is what I assumed the sentence meant (disturbing though the situation be) wasn't accepted, so I wanted to verify what this sentence meant.
That article doesn't seem the best of references given that newsner appears to be a less-than-journalisticaly-credible Swedish site, and it also includes the unusual word "softwares," which Wiktionary lists as "Generally an error by non-native speakers." The source article it links to uses the expected "in the road."
"Sitting on the road" is quite common in India. Usually not "in the middle of the road" (although I have seen that) ; but by the edge of the road but still on the road (the actual pavement where you drive). Also, people sit "by the side of the road" (not on the pavement).
Maybe she's just really tired. Or staging a sit-in to protest access to an environmentally sensitive bird sanctuary.
Sometimes Indians do a bandh (demonstration) by sitting on (or in) the road to obstruct traffic. Perhaps grandmother is a social activist.
