Hindi

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is one of the many, many (far too many) syntactic formalisms posited by linguists in the Chomskyian era. CCG has been outlined in work by Mark Steedman, the most recent guide being his 2001 book which I have to read for a class. Unlike most other syntactic theories, I find the mechanics of CCG very elegant. There is no difference between the distributional categorisation of a lexeme and the argument structure that it has; both are neatly contained in the CCG type system, and the connections to type theory just work out very nicely (with the caveat that this is in my limited understanding of type theory)....

Hindi is the best-studied language in South Asia. It would not be the worst thing if every linguist working on Hindi decided to take a break and pick any other language of the region to study. Nonetheless, Hindi does not set a relatively high bar for linguistic investigation when compared to other languages of the world; there is plenty that simply hasn't been described in any work by a linguist, let alone analysed or explained....

After the fragmentation of Sanskrit, one of the innovative features that developed across the Indo-Aryan language family are the "pleonastic" suffixes, including (but not limited to) -kk-, -ḍ-, -r-, -l(l)-, and nominal diminutives -ka- (m.) and -ikā- (f.). Pleonastic means serving no semantic purpose; basically, the consensus has been that these suffixes merely served as phonological extensions to distinguish words after the collapse of many phonotactic distinctions from Sanskrit to Middle Indo-Aryan....

One of the first unfamiliar distinctions that a learner of Sanskrit will encounter is parasmaipada vs. ātmanepada verbs. They have two different sets of morphological endings—a pain on top of the different endings for the 10 root classes—but often no obvious difference in meaning. Does it actually matter whether I use parasmaipada or ātmanepada forms? Why not stick to one to halve the number of endings I need to learn?...

There is a weird developing cultural trend in some circles of treating Hindi as a sole inheritor of Sanskrit. Obviously, this is tied to the political centralisation around certain religious ideologies, which seem to have an obsession for a singular national language (invariably Hindi). But a lot of the arguments for this special status of Hindi are grounded in linguistic nonsense. I responded to one instance of this on Twitter, but it was a long thread that isn’t really nice to view on there so this blog post is a form of that....