Hindi, Urdu: commas to indicate incidental information

[MonsieurGonzalito]

Friends,

Are commas also utilized in HU, as a way differentiate a clause that provides essential information versus another that provides only incidental information?

For example, if I say

1. vo laRkaa jo vahaaN khaRaa hai meraa beTaa hai
2. vo laRkaa, jo vahaaN khaRaa hai, meraa beTaa hai

Could I assume, as I would in English, that in #1 the boy is not yet sufficiently identified, and the [jo vahaaN khaRaa hai] helps identifying him, whereas in #2 the boy is sufficiently identified by the "vo", and that [jo vahaaN khaRaa hai] is merely providing additional (in grammatical jargon: "non restrictive") information?

(The written samples I could find are inconclusive in this regard. But that might be because I mostly get them from the Internet, and search engines ignore commas.)

Thanks in advance.

[P.S.: if not commas, maybe other punctuation signs such as hyphens are utilized for this? vo laRjaa - jo vahaaN khaRaa hai- ...]

 

[littlepond]

#1 situation would be rather written as "vahaaN khaRaa laRkaa meraa beTaa hai." Both your sentences 1 and 2 would indicate situation #2, and given that, it should only be sentence 2, as sentence 1 would be wrong to write. Actually, even in English, if you have already determined the boy in a definite manner through the demonstrative, i.e., "That boy," sentence 1 would be wrong, so there is no difference from English.

In English, the restrictive sentence would be "The boy who is standing there is my son" rather than "That boy who is standing there is my son." The latter is a wrong sentence: it has to have commas, that is, "That boy, who is standing there, is my son."

In a nutshell, no difference from English.

 

[MonsieurGonzalito]

I believe that both your implicit premises about English are wrong, namely: that the definite article doesn't determine, and that the demonstrative article always does.
Sometimes, "the" boy can be perfectly identified at the time of the speech.
And, conversely, "that" boy by itself might not be enough to identify him (for example, if we were pointing to a group of boys, only one of which were standing).

So you are saying that:
vo laRkaa jo vahaaN khaRaa hai, meraa beTaa hai
would be odd in Hindi, and that:
vo laRkaa, jo vahaaN khaRaa hai, meraa beTaa hai
would be correct, always indicating incidental (non restrictive, non determining) information?

Also, I am not sure if you answered whether or not the commas are necessary in Hindi, or instead that the word choice and layout are always sufficient to differentiate essential versus nonessential information, without the need of commas.

 

[littlepond]

I believe that both your implicit premises about English are wrong, namely: that the definite article doesn't determine, and that the demonstrative article always does.
Sometimes, "the" boy can be perfectly identified at the time of the speech.
And, conversely, "that" boy by itself might not be enough to identify him (for example, if we were pointing to a group of boys, only one of which were standing).

You are once again putting words in my mouth that I did not say, and as far as I am concerned, your understanding about English articles and demonstratives is wrong. Of course, the definite article can determine, and that is why it is called the definite article! If there were a group with five girls and one boy, it is sufficient to say "The boy did that." But if there were three boys, two sitting, one standing, then you have to restrict it "The boy who is standing did that."

As for the demonstrative article, if it can be replaced with "the" without loss of intended meaning, then it needs restriction, for after all it is but a "the" in disguise of "that." Pointing to that group of boys in which only one boy is standing, I can point to the group with my finger and say "The boy who is standing over there ..." as much as "That boy who is standing over there ..." The "that" in such a sentence is not wholly redundant, for it can add a nuance (for example, an accusatory tone), but for matters of determination, it is redundant and can be replaced with "the."

When it's a "true" demonstrative, there is no need of any qualifying clause to determine anything. There is a boy in front of you, one on your right, on on your left. You point to your left and say "That boy did it." You need not say whether he is standing or sitting. "The boy did it" will not work here.

So you are saying that:
vo laRkaa jo vahaaN khaRaa hai, meraa beTaa hai
would be odd in Hindi, and that:
vo laRkaa, jo vahaaN khaRaa hai, meraa beTaa hai
would be correct, always indicating incidental (non restrictive, non determining) information?

Nothing is odd in speech, because a comma indicates a pause, and people may take no pause (as in Post 1 sentence 1), one pause (as in Post 3 sentence 1) or both the pauses (Posts 1 and 3 sentence 2). (I note that you have changed your first sentence in the quoted post. Post 1 had an unwieldy sentence without any commas, whereas now you have put one comma in the first sentence.)

I have already given my answer, in fact. There is no difference between English and Hindi regarding comma positions, and both languages would put or omit them in the same positions.

 

[MonsieurGonzalito]

You are once again putting words in my mouth that I did not say, and as far as I am concerned, your understanding about English articles and demonstratives is wrong. Of course, the definite article can determine, and that is why it is called the definite article! If there were a group with five girls and one boy, it is sufficient to say "The boy did that." But if there were three boys, two sitting, one standing, then you have to restrict it "The boy who is standing did that."

As for the demonstrative article, if it can be replaced with "the" without loss of intended meaning, then it needs restriction, for after all it is but a "the" in disguise of "that." Pointing to that group of boys in which only one boy is standing, I can point to the group with my finger and say "The boy who is standing over there ..." as much as "That boy who is standing over there ..." The "that" in such a sentence is not wholly redundant, for it can add a nuance (for example, an accusatory tone), but for matters of determination, it is redundant and can be replaced with "the."

When it's a "true" demonstrative, there is no need of any qualifying clause to determine anything. There is a boy in front of you, one on your right, on on your left. You point to your left and say "That boy did it." You need not say whether he is standing or sitting. "The boy did it" will not work here.

Let's leave it at that.

There is no difference between English and Hindi regarding comma positions, and both languages would put or omit them in the same positions.

If I interpreted your anwer correctly, this is true only regarding the red comma
(in regard to whether or not the information introduced afterwards is incidental)


vo laRkaa, jo vahaaN khaRaa hai, meraa beTaa hai

whereas the green comma seems to be some HU language feature for that kind of construction
(and that comma is rarely used in English, one doesn't normally use it in "That boy who is standing there _ is my son").

 

[littlepond]

vo laRkaa, jo vahaaN khaRaa hai, meraa beTaa hai

whereas the green comma seems to be some HU language feature for that kind of construction
(and that comma is rarely used in English, one doesn't normally use it in "That boy who is standing there _ is my son").

The "green" comma is a common feature of many European languages. You probably have not recognised it because when you are inserting a green comma, you are basically eliding a "voh": "voh laRkaa jo vahaaN khaRaa hai, voh meraa beTaa hai."

To compare with a European language: "Le garçon qui est debout là/qui se tient là, (lui, ) c’est mon fils."

Of course, you could have the comma-less sentence, too, in Hindi (though not so natural in French). This slightly reminds me of the topic construction as is common in Mandarin Chinese.

 

[MonsieurGonzalito]

In light of what was commented here, from post #11 onwards

Hindi, Urdu: more about "the man I love"

I wonder if the reason for the dearth of commas in HU, is because native speakers perceive that extraposed relatives (the ones that are placed last in the sentence) in a way are always non-specificative (i.e., they are always previously specified by the previous correlative, word, usually a demonstrative).

If this is true, then the difference between specificative and non-specificative is something artificially introduced in translations, when a heading "the" is used.

 

[aevynn]

Are commas also utilized in HU, as a way differentiate a clause that provides essential information versus another that provides only incidental information?

Would you say that HU is more relaxed regarding the obligatoriness of commas for non-restrictive clauses?
In Spanish it is a hard rule: "an apposition is that thing that goes between commas", period.
On the contrary, HU grammars are rather casual about the whole commas subject, it is kind of treated as a given.

I think we've discussed this on this forum before, but neither UH orthographic tradition is nearly as standardized as Spanish. There exist versions of the RAE, but their prescriptions are not so sweeping, and they have no real authority so even the few prescriptions they do make are not followed to a tee by anyone. I have no idea if they've made prescriptions about this particular point. So yes, a comma is not orthographically obligatory for non-restrictive relative clauses.

If your question is about prosody of speech rather than orthography, then I think the story gets a lot more complicated... Probably a "interposed" relative clause (one that interrupts the matriorthographicallyx clause) is more likely to have brief pauses around it if it's functioning non-restrictively as opposed to restrictively (similar to the pauses indicated by commas in English), but I don't feel confident about asserting that as a hard-and-fast rule: a lot comes down to context. If one reads Manto's sentence from shaadaaN aloud, for example, it feels unambiguously non-restrictive whether or not one puts brief pauses around the "interposed" relative clause.

native speakers perceive that extraposed relatives (the ones that are placed last in the sentence) in a way are always non-specificative (i.e., they are always previously specified by the previous correlative, word, usually a demonstrative).

It might be fair to say that the extraposed relatives are more likely to be non-restrictive (or non-specificative) while "correlatives" are more likely to be restrictive, but I'm rather skeptical about a (bolded and italicized) "always" assertion about this...

 

[MonsieurGonzalito]

For a moment I wondered if, given the facts that:
1- HU does not have articles (and therefore, it lacks the capacity of using a non-determinatively-charged word as corrrelative)
2- all relatives kind of expect a correlative word as counterpart (in the few cases where there isn't one, it seems to be mostly some sort of "stylistic omission")
3- for some native speakers (such as @littlepond jii in #4) the mere presence of a demonstrative indicates determination

then probably the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive is alien to HU, and there is only "different levels of non-restrictiveness". That would kind of justify the absence of hard rules regarding the comma.

Anyway, just another of my crazy grammar theories 😄

 

[littlepond]

3- for some native speakers (such as @littlepond jii in #4) the mere presence of a demonstrative indicates determination

The "mere" presence of a demonstrative indicates determination in English, too, or would in any language in my imagination, but maybe because the word morphology doesn't change in English, you are not realising that. Let's take Norwegian: "that little flower" is "den vakre blomsten" instead of "den vakker blomsten," as the demonstrative den ("that") has qualified, in other words determined definitively, the subject in question.

 

[MonsieurGonzalito]

I you think so, then the necessary conclusion is that basically all HU extraposed relative clauses with an explicit correlative word are non-restrictive, i.e. appositions, i.e. substantive in nature (not adjectival), i.e. interchangeable with the thing they refer to in the main clause, i.e. what one always put between commas in English.

 

[MonsieurGonzalito]

The "mere" presence of a demonstrative indicates determination in English, too, or would in any language in my imagination, but maybe because the word morphology doesn't change in English, you are not realising that.

Let's use a European language in which morphology does change. For example, Spanish.

"That boy who is speaking is my son".

1. "Ese muchacho que está hablando es mi hijo".

2. "Ese muchacho, que está hablando, es mi hijo".


(Translating word-by-word using the "embedded relative" format, which is the norm in Spanish)

vo laRkaa jo bol rɛhtaa hai meraa beTaa hai.

jo = "que". However, in sentence #2 "que" is replaceable with other relative expressions: "quien", "el que", "el cual". Such replacement is not possible in sentence #1. (*)

This tells me that the "ese" = vo of the first sentence, despite being a demonstrative, does not have enough "identifying power" to fully isolate the boy, and it is acting as some sort of syntactic placeholder in tandem with the relative, wich completes the identification.

So, I don't think it is true that a demonstrative pronoun used in tandem with a relative clause automatically makes said clause non-restrictive.

Furthermore, let's keep in mind that the HU demonstrative vo is even more "stretched" in terms of the roles it has to fulfill, in relation to English or Spanish, because these latter languages have definite articles.
For me, the most natural way to translate:

jo laRkaa bol rɛhtaa hai, vo meraa beTaa hai.

would be:

"El muchacho que está hablando es mi hijo"
"The boy who is speaking is my son"

and not

"Ese muchacho que está hablando es mi hijo"
"That boy who is speaking is my son".

Which seems to suggest (although I cannot get in the mind of a HU speaker) that the vo fulfills many roles, and it does sometimes have this role of toned-down "placeholder", not sufficiently identifying.

This long digression is just to establish whether HU doesn't tend to use commas just because its grammatical tradition is simply not standardized in that regard, or maybe because there are subtler reasons. Namely: that if in HU the vo is always fully determining (as @littlepond jii proposes), then we don't really have a difference between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, but always different shades of non-restrictives.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

(*) I believe that, to a degree, this happens also in English with "which", although not in the same cut-and-dried way as in Spanish. In English, "which" tends to be used with non-restrictive clauses.

 

[littlepond]

Let's use a European language in which morphology does change. For example, Spanish.

"That boy who is speaking is my son".

1. "Ese muchacho que está hablando es mi hijo".

2. "Ese muchacho, que está hablando, es mi hijo".

Where is the morphology change, by the way? I am unable to spot it. I only see additional commas.

Furthermore, let's keep in mind that the HU demonstrative vo is even more "stretched" in terms of the roles it has to fulfill, in relation to English or Spanish, because these latter languages have definite articles.

No. The definite article is implied in many ways. For example, in this example, see (1) below.

(1) "The boy who is speaking is my son": "laRkaa jo bol rahaa hai meraa beTaa hai"
(2) "That boy, who (by the way) is speaking, is my son": "voh laRkaa, jo bol rahaa hai, meraa beTaa hai"

In writing (2), some may skip the comma. But the comma is implicit, as one doesn't double-qualify something.

As for English, see my post 2.

 

[MonsieurGonzalito]

Where is the morphology change, by the way? I am unable to spot it. I only see additional commas.

The "morphology change" consists in the ability to change the pronoun in the apposition clauses, but not in the adjective clauses. Since it is not an inflection change, but a whole new word, calling it "a word change" would have been more appropriate.

For example:

"Ese muchacho que está hablando es mi hijo".
That boy who is speaking is my son"

"Ese muchacho, el cual está hablando, es mi hijo".
That boy, which is/happens to be speaking, is my son.

So I don't think that a demonstrative pronoun, by itself, always contains enough "restrictive power" as to render whatever relative clause you put after the noun non-restrictive.
But I understand you think differently.
I know you speak French. Can you honestly say that the "ce" isn't sometimes anything more than a syntactic filler?

Furthermore, you seem to think that even definite articles (in languages who have them) also have always such restrictive power, in all cases, (and again, that everything one puts after the noun becomes therefore non-restrictive). I believe that is too extreme a view, and certainly doesn't match my experience as a speaker of a language that does have definite articles.


But let's assume your position for a moment.

Don't you find that translating:
jo laRkaa bol rɛhtaa hai vo meraa beTaa hai.
as
"That boy, who (by the way) is speaking, is my son"

sounds a little over-the-top, over determined, and the relative clause too incidental?
Wouldn't a "The boy that is speaking" have worked better (better as in, what a HU speaker really means to say)?
(this, I am asking out of ignorance)


And one last point

(1) "The boy who is speaking is my son": "laRkaa jo bol rahaa hai meraa beTaa hai"

Since everybody hammers so much the point that this is the "least frequent" and "least idiomatic" of ways to place a relative, (and that indeed it might be a fresh addition to the language coming from the massive influx of poorly translated English texts during the XX century *), and, on the other hand you insist in that any other way is non-restrictive, then one has to conclude that HU doesn't have (or didn't have until very recently) a way to convey restrictive information after a noun!

That sounds ... astounding to me, but if you tell me explicitly that that is the case, then I am satisfied, and there is nothing much to discuss in this regard.


__________________________________________________________________________________________________
(*) I found this paper very interesting. It is available online, but it is a little hard to find and the links vary, so I am attaching the PDF.

 

[aevynn]

vo laRkaa jo bol rɛhtaa hai meraa beTaa hai.

... jo bol rahaa hai ...

(*) I believe that, to a degree, this happens also in English with "which", although not in the same cut-and-dried way as in Spanish. In English, "which" tends to be used with non-restrictive clauses.

I don't think this is accurate (at least, not for my dialect of English). What I think is true (for my dialect of English) is: a relativizer wh-word (including "which") can be used both restrictively and non-restrictively, but the wh-word can only swapped out for the relativizer "that" in restrictive situations.

I found this paper very interesting. It is available online, but it is a little hard to find and the links vary, so I am attaching the PDF.

Thanks for this reference!

... one has to conclude that HU doesn't have (or didn't have until very recently) a way to convey restrictive information after a noun!

I don't understand the line of reasoning that leads you to this, but this is an absurd conclusion, so...

... if you tell me explicitly that that is the case ...

It is definitely not the case!

My elementary understanding is that, if you're faced with a sentence that contains a relative clause and you want to classify it as restrictive vs non-restrictive, the basic thing you must do is look at the real-life context in which that sentence was uttered and ask yourself: would the person/thing/whatever that's being spoken about have been uniquely identified by the utterance if one dropped the relative clause? If the answer is no, the clause is restrictive; if it's yes, then the clause is non-restrictive. By that standard, UH unequivocally has relative clauses of both these types --- even if you rule out the "interposed" relative clauses. [My hunch would be that a "correlative" like jo laRkaa wahaaN khaRaa hai, wo(h) meraa beTaa hai would have a strong tilt towards restrictive usages, while a "extraposed" relative like wo(h) laRkaa meraa beTaa hai, jo wahaaN khaRaa hai would have a weaker tilt towards non-restrictive usages.]

 

[littlepond]

Furthermore, you seem to think that even definite articles (in languages who have them) also have always such restrictive power, in all cases, (and again, that everything one puts after the noun becomes therefore non-restrictive). I believe that is too extreme a view, and certainly doesn't match my experience as a speaker of a language that does have definite articles.

My view was expressed in post 2. Sometimes, you understand what I say differently and then put words in my mouth according to your interpretation.

Since everybody hammers so much the point that this is the "least frequent" and "least idiomatic" of ways to place a relative

There is nothing unidiomatic or less frequent about "laRkaa jo bol rahaa hai"! I don't know from where you got this. Of course, you could also say "bolne vaalaa laRkaa" or something equivalent.

 

[MonsieurGonzalito]

There is nothing unidiomatic or less frequent about "laRkaa jo bol rahaa hai"! I don't know from where you got this.

This is said, implicitly or explicitly, pretty much in any grammar or paper on the subject I read. So if it is not true, I would like to know.

Essentially, grammars classify the relatives modifying a noun in 3 types:

1. "internally headed" (with the noun inside the relative):
[jo laRke bol rahe haiN] vo mere bachche haiN

2. "extraposed" (with the relative pushed to the end, after the correlative part has been fully expressed):
vo laRke mere bachche haiN [jo bol rahe haiN]

3. "embedded" (i.e. the European languages' style, in which the relative is "inserted", from a HU speaker point of view (*), in what seems to be the beginning of the correlative part):
vo laRke [jo bol rahe haiN] mere bachche haiN

And my material pretty much unanimosuly says that #3 is not only the least frequent pattern in HU, but even (according the to the article I provided earlier), a relatively recent (XX century) addition to the language.

So, it is not true? #3 is very ingrained into HU nowadays?

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EDIT: (*) I don't presume to understand how a HU speaker thinks. For me, as a Spanish speaker, #3 is the normal way.