"गायें बिल्लियाँ नहीं होती हैं।"
Translation:Cows are not cats.
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1528
I think you mean “hota”, though. “होता” is pronounced “hota”, not “hona”. And in this instance, with a feminine subject, it’s “होती”, pronounced “hoti”.
I get how "Cows eat grass." and "Cows don't eat carrion." are generally true statements about cows. However "Cows are not cats." seems different to me since it is not information about cows. it is sort of nonsense, while the other two statements could be informative, say, to a child. If बिल्लियाँ could be understood as "felines", I could understand this sentence as "a general truth." Perhaps a child would not know the word "feline", but I think it would be more natural to say "A cow is not in the cat family." But that seems too obvious state. Hindi speakers, to your mind is this a good example of the use/meaning of होता है?
Of course not,but there are many other instances where such sentences are like - मैं एक मछली हूँ, मैं सब्जी नहीं हूँ,इत्यादि| So i think we should expect these kind of sentence from duo.
1015
The use of 'hona' here is for 'gnomic' truths or statements about general principles.
In Old English (Anglo-Saxon) you also had two verbs - 'wesan' = 'to be, to exist', and 'bēon' = 'to be', but as gnomic statements. The latter became our general infinitive 'to be'. So "Cattas ne bēoð hundas' means 'cats shall not be dogs,' or 'cyning bið anwealda' means 'a king shall be sovereign'.
Hindi seems to do something similar by using 'hoti' in addition to 'hãi'.
I see. So are the Wiktionary tables (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/होना#Hindi) incorrect? Or is there an optionality aspect here, in the sense that you can still nasalize even with aux. verb present if you want?
151
Why 'The cows are not the cats ' wouldn't be correct ? Sorry if you find my question foolish but I really don't get it.
Hindi does not have a definite article that's equivalent to 'the'. If you really want to specify definiteness, you can use यह/वह (this/that) but otherwise, definiteness is inferred from context. So, for most sentences, you can translate into English with or without the 'the'.
But because this sentence has a 'होती', this is a general statement about all cows and not a particular set of cows. Therefore, using 'the' isn't appropriate.