- Forum >
- Topic: Hindi >
- "हर आदमी स्कूल जाता है।"
34 Comments
So admi always means man (male person) and not man as human in general? I was wondering since I know this is a loanword from Farsi and there adami (historically) was also used for human in generalized sentences.
Depends on the context. आदमी is a lot like the English word 'man' in that it is sometimes used to mean 'human' or 'person' but is still an explicitly gendered word.
Eg: 'कुत्ता आदमी का सबसे अच्छा दोस्त है'- Dog is man's best friend. Here, you are making a generalised sentence where आदमी does mean human.
'आम आदमी'- Common man. Usually includes women but you can also have sentences like भारत की आम औरत आम आदमी से कम कमाती है (The common woman of India earns less than the common man).
It may also introduce some ambiguity. 'कल हमारे सारे आदमी हड़ताल पर होंगे' - 'Tomorrow, all our men (may mean 'workers' here in this context) will be on strike'. Will the female employees also be on strike or will they be working as usual?
In general, if you are comfortable using the word 'man' in an English sentence, you can probably translate it to आदमी.
1183
In normal conversation, you are correct. आदमी is used to refer इंसान (human), as every person.
In English, after every, you use the singular form of the word (every day, every man, every time, etc.).
All men go to school translates to सारे आदमी स्कूल जाते हैं। Every man goes to school translates to हर आदमी स्कूल जाता है । However, both sense the same but differ in literal translation.
It's possible they are divergent forms of the same Proto Indo-European root word. PIE linguists on these forums will have to chime in.
Thank you, Vinay, for sharing your wealth of knowledge here in the comments sections! Since you seem to be quite knowledgeable, can you explain why it is in English, the sentence is "... goes to school," and in Hindi the 'to' is not accounted for?
With the verbs आना and जाना, the postposition को (corresponding to 'to') is usually dropped. You can think of this being similar to a sentence like 'I am going home' in English. While English drops the preposition for just 'home', Hindi does it for most objects.
But even when it is dropped, the fact that a postposition is supposed to be there in the sentence still influences its grammar. For example, consider the sentence 'पीटर मेरे स्कूल जाता है' (Peter goes to my school'). You can see that the noun phrase 'मेरे स्कूल' is in the oblique case. But for it to be in the oblique case, it has to be the object of a postposition. We resolve this by saying that it is the object of an 'implicit' postposition that's present between मेरे स्कूल and जाता. People in these forums have been referring to this as a 'ghostposition'.
Thank you! Since I'm still struggling with what exactly a preposition is and is not, in this sentence specifically, is the preposition 'is'?
Isn't the "loop" on the top at the end of "man" a feminine indicator? I'm very new so please excuse if this is a dumb question.
Most words ending in the vowel sound 'ī' (which is what the loop indicates) are feminine but there are quite a few exceptions like आदमी (man), हाथी (elephant), पानी (water) etc which are masculine.
Similarly, most words ending in the vowel sound 'ā' (ा) are masculine but exceptions like महिला (woman/lady), चिड़िया (Bird), माला (garland) exist.
These are only rules of thumb to help you guess the gender of an unknown word and are not actual rules that the language abides by. The grammatical gender of a word is decided by a combination of its meaning, sound, etymology and historical usage and it's impossible to know it for sure just by looking at the word. This is also true for many other languages with a concept of grammatical gender (like Spanish and French).
Thank you for your excellent reply! I did not understand about the exceptions.
Would really love it when I dont have to keep writing this odd sentence in English!
"All men go to school," was rejected. Are "each man" and "all men" not interchangeable? How would one say "all men go to school" if not this?
Persian.
Persian was the official language of many dynasties that ruled in India at various points of time. So, Hindi has quite a few loanwords from Persian. Arabic loanwords also exist but are much fewer in number. In fact, a lot of Arabic loanwords came into Hindi/Urdu via Persian.
