Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September 30, 2023

Learning Urdu (part 2)

It is now over 2 years since I started to learn Urdu. I have already posted a blog on my initial observations.  As time has progressed, I am slowly becoming more familiar with the language, and, when I improvise a new sentence, some of my "guesses" prove right.  One thing to get used to is that "a" is a marker of the masculine singular (in Indo-European languages I am familiar with, it is a marker of feminine singular), "i" is a marker of feminine gender (singular and plural), and "e" is a marker of the masculine plural.  Urdu verbs seem quite straightforward. In the infinitive, verbs typically end in "na" ("hona" to be, "karna" do to, "sona" to sleep, "sunna" to hear etc.). When conjugating a verb, the root is used with or without an ending, eg "mein kam KARTA hun" means "I am working" where KARTA is the root KAR plus the ending TA to express a habitual present tense.  Vocabul...