"The elephants are big."
Translation:हाथी बड़े हैं ।
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Why isn't the plural form हाथीयाँ? And why isn't हाथी treated as a feminine noun, despite ending with "ी"?
हाथी is a masculine noun. Whatever rules you might have read to predict noun-genders based on word endings are only rough guidelines and all of them have many exceptions. My suggestion is that any time you come across a new noun, learn it along with an adjective (like बड़ा कुत्ता, बड़ी बिल्ली). This helped me a lot while learning French.
The plural form '-iyan' is only for feminine nouns ending with -ī. Since हाथी is masculine, its plural form remains हाथी
It's just a pie-to-pie translation from DUO. But actually it won't be like that but like "Hathi bade HOTE hai"
"हाथी बड़े होते हैं"
होते is used to make generalisations. हाथी बड़े होते हैं is saying that elephants, in general, are big animals. This sentence would have to be translated into English as 'Elephants are big'.
The definite article 'the' in the sentence 'The elephants are big' implies that we are talking about a particular group of elephants. So, there shouldn't be a होते in the Hindi translation.
