# Hindi:  हाँ, मुझ को मालूम है hām̐ mujh kō mālūm hai



## Au101

In a sentence with मालूम _mālūm_ like हाँ, मुझ को मालूम है _hām̐ mujh kō mālūm hai_ what would be the subject?

In sentences with पसंद _pasand_, which use a similar construction, the subject is the thing that is pleasing. So, for example, in उस को समोसे पसंद हैं _us kō samōsē pasand haiṁ_, समोसे _samōsē_ is the subject. But with मालूम _mālūm_ the thing that is known is usually dropped or is an entire dependent clause. So what would be the subject? Is it an elided subject? Or should we take मालूम _mālūm_ as the subject. Only, if we do that, we should then presumably take पसंद _pasand_ to be the subject in sentences that contain it. But that surely isn't right, it looks to me like an adjective used predicatively.


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## aevynn

I think the subject is the thing that's known, and the subject isn't always elided or an entire dependent clause. It can also be words like _baat_ or _baateN_, and then the verb clause agrees with this word. For example, the following sentence is from Jawaharlal Nehru's letters to his daughter, and the Hindi translation is due to Premchand.  

And if we study history in this way we can learn a lot from it. 

अगर हम इतिहास को इस तरीके से पढ़ें तो हमें उससे बहुत-सी बातें मालूम होंगी।
agar ham itihaas ko is tariike se paRheN to hameN usse bahut-sii baateN maaluum hongii.​


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## Dib

It takes the same construction as pasand, e.g. check this book on pp. 70-71. They contain two ghazals with their rhymes on मालूम होते हैंand मालूम होती हैं|
Adam


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## Au101

Thank you both, it's much appreciated 

I understand the construction well enough, I suppose I'm just after the subject in this sentence:

हाँ, मुझ को मालूम है


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## Dib

In Hindi subjects and objects can be (freely?) dropped when they are clear from context. So, you can take it as an elided वह|


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## Au101

Dib said:


> In Hindi subjects and objects can be (freely?) dropped when they are clear from context. So, you can take it as an elided वह|



Excellent, now I see yes! Sorry, it's just I was taking notes on how in a sentence like मुझ को ज़ुकाम है, ज़ुकाम is the subject, and I was going through the example sentences taking notes on the subject, and then an analysis of sentences with मालूम kinda got me scratching my head.


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## Dib

Haha, yes, I see that.  So similar, yet not the same!!

On a second thought, the construction with pasand is actually a bit weird, because unlike maaluum, which is an adjective in origin ("known" in Arabic, passive participle of 3-l-m, to know), pasand is a feminine noun. But in this construction ("mujhe pasand hai") it works like an adjective. Otherwise, its adjective form is "pasandiidaa" (favourite).

On a third thought, even "maaluum" seems to have a noun-usage, at least as the plural "maaluumaat", meaning "information about something" (like what a tourist guide provides you about a site). Admittedly, it is more on the Urdu side of the things, and Hindi would rather use "jaan-kaarii" (I love this word somehow ), but I found this interesting.


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## Au101

Dib said:


> Haha, yes, I see that.  So similar, yet not the same!!
> 
> On a second thought, the construction with pasand is actually a bit weird, because unlike maaluum, which is an adjective in origin ("known" in Arabic, passive participle of 3-l-m, to know), pasand is a feminine noun. But in this construction ("mujhe pasand hai") it works like an adjective. Otherwise, its adjective form is "pasandiidaa" (favourite).
> 
> On a third thought, even "maaluum" seems to have a noun-usage, at least as the plural "maaluumaat", meaning "information about something" (like what a tourist guide provides you about a site). Admittedly, it is more on the Urdu side of the things, and Hindi would rather use "jaan-kaarii" (I love this word somehow ), but I found this interesting.



Very interesting! Thanks for all the added extras!

More for my own interest than anything, in the sentence क्या तुमको मालूम है कि राज कहाँ है? _kyā tumkō mālūm hai ki rāj kahām̐ hai?_ what would you say is the subject? Is it another case of a dropped subject, or is the dependent clause the subject in Hindi. Because analysing these kinda sentences from the point of view of English grammar is pretty misguided as in the English "Do you know where Raj is", you would be a subject whereas तुम _tum_ is emphatically not a subject in the Hindi 

For the purposes of my notes I don't mind saying leave it to the linguists and simply underlining that the construction follows the standard pattern, but I'm rather interested myself!


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## Dib

Indeed we should best leave it to the linguists to figure out. But I can probably still add something meaningful. I was initially going to suggest that the clause "ki raaj kahaaN hai" was the subject, just as "where Raj is" is the object in the English version. But then I realized, that interpretation has some problems. Let's first start with a slightly different version of you example: "kyaa tum ko maaluum hai raaj kahaaN hai?" which is ostensibly the same sentence with the "ki" dropped. I'd say rather confidently that the clause "raaj kahaaN hai" is the grammatical subject here. You can move it around freely inside the sentence like any regular subject: "kyaa raaj kahaaN hai tum ko maaluum hai?" and "kyaa tum ko raaj kahaaN hai maaluum hai?" But as soon as you add the "ki", these movements get disallowed. The clause has to go to the end of the sentence. This is unlike a regular subject and I'd like a syntactician's professional help to demystify this phenomenon.


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## Au101

Well thank you very much indeed - I'm most obliged!


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## MonsieurGonzalito

Syntactically, "ki" is just a subordinating nexus. It introduces the nominal phrase that acts as subject in this case, but it has no syntactical value inside the subordinated phrase itself.

By contrast, "kahaaM" (or any other interrogative adverb) is a "relating" nexus, which not only subordinates the nominal phrase, but also fulfills a verb modifier function inside it.

Nothing is "dropped", and there is nothing special about Hindi here. English works exactly the same.
Compare:
_  It was unknown to me that she loved me.  => _"that" is just a subordinating nexus
_  It was unknown to me why she loved me.  => _"why" is a relating nexus.

And "that/why she loved me", as was already answered, are the subjects of the previous 2 sentences.


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## Dib

Thanks MonsieurGonzalito for your reply. Probably, I was not very clear. Adding or dropping the "ki" was not the mystery in itself. What was mystereous to me was the fact that when the ki is added the subordinate clause may not be moved around any more. Thus *"kyaa ki raaj kahaaN hai tum ko maaluum hai?" and *"kyaa tum ko ki raaj kahaaN hai maaluum hai?" are (to the best of my judgement) not acceptable (or almost unacceptable) in Hindi, while without the "ki" they are perfectly good sentences. I may, of course, be wrong in my judgement, since my mastery of Hindi is certainly not perfect.


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## MonsieurGonzalito

I don't know that much Hindi, so I am guessing here.

Given that क्या तुमको मालूम है कि राज कहाँ है? is acceptable, then I would assume that redundantly allowing the कि nexus is a characteristic of the language. 
Since कि is already redundant, its only purpose being to clearly indicate what you are subordinating, it sort of makes sense to me that it is not acceptable to move it around the sentence.


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## aevynn

Also not a professional syntactician, but... Despite @Dib's very astute observation regarding moving noun clauses marked with _ki_, I'm still tempted to analyze the noun clause marked with _ki_ as the subject of the sentence.

In sentences involving _maaluum honaa_ where the thing that is known is a simple noun (rather than a noun clause), it seems to be relatively clear that that noun functions as the subject of the sentence, as we can see from the fact that the verb phrase agrees in gender/number/person with that noun. When the thing that is known is a noun clause, we do see "default" masculine singular 3rd person verb inflections (_mujhe maaluum hai/thaa ki..._), which is what we would expect if the noun clause was functioning as the subject. If I'm understanding correctly, the question @Dib has posed, then, is whether the inability to move the subject when it is marked with the subordinating conjunction _ki_ necessitates an alternative syntactic analysis of such sentences (eg, perhaps an analysis in which the noun clause is not the subject).

I suspect such an alternative analysis is not really necessary. It seems somewhat reasonable to me to try to model phrase-movement in Hindi as a Chomsky-esque transformation on the sentence, but with a restriction on its applicability: it cannot move a noun clause marked by _ki _away from the end of the sentence. This might feel a little haphazard, and maybe it is, but it would probably also be a little haphazard to propose that a noun clause marked by _ki_ cannot be a subject but an unmarked one can.

That said, one thing that is definitely worth asking is: is it at all reasonable to posit transformations that are sensitive to the presence of subordinating conjunctions?

I think the answer to this is likely yes, but my linguistic repertoire isn't remotely vast enough to be very confident about this. The only other language I feel very comfortable making acceptability judgments in is English. Obviously English doesn't allow phrase-movement like Hindi does; English word order is much more rigid. But the pragmatic purpose of phrase-movement in Hindi is usually to shift the topic-comment structure of the sentence, so maybe it's reasonable to compare against a different transformation in English which also shifts topic-comment structure: passivization.

Consider the following sentence 1a, and its passivized form 1b.

1a. I expected that he'd fall asleep.
1b. That he'd fall asleep was expected.​
Then consider the analogs without the subordinating conjunction "that."

2a. I expected he'd fall sleep.
2b. *He'd fall asleep was expected.​I expect other Anglophones would also probably uniformly find 2b to be unacceptable. In other words, what we're seeing here is that the objects of sentences 1a and 2a are both subordinate clauses that differ only in that one lacks a subordinating conjunction (or, more precisely, the clause in 1a is subordinated by an explicit conjunction whereas the one in 2a is subordinated "by zero"). But this difference is enough to cause differing behavior when it comes to passivization: 1a can be passivized in the obvious way, but 2a cannot [1].

I guess the situation in English is backwards from the observations about Hindi in that it's the _presence_ of the subordinating conjunction _ki_ that seems to prevent phrase-movement in Hindi, but it's the _absence_ of the subordinating conjunction "that" prevents passivization in English. But, in any case, this does maybe at least suggest that it's not unreasonable to propose transformations that are sensitive to the presence of subordinating conjunctions.

So maybe the question I'd like to pose for people with bigger linguistic repertoires than me is... In languages that allow noun clauses to be subordinated either by an explicit subordinating conjunction or by zero, are there any transformations that are sensitive to the presence of the subordinating conjunction?

-----

[1]: That said, note that one can still passivize both 1a and 2a using the "anticipatory it" construction.

1c. It was expected that he'd fall asleep.
2c. It was expected he'd fall asleep.​


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## Dib

aevynn said:


> If I'm understanding correctly, the question @Dib has posed, then, is whether the inability to move the subject when it is marked with the subordinating conjunction _ki_ necessitates an alternative syntactic analysis of such sentences (eg, perhaps an analysis in which the noun clause is not the subject).



Yes, this is exactly my question. Thank you very much for restating it very clearly. And a huge thank you for the rest of your comment. While my familiarity with formal syntax is minuscule, I find your comparison with English passivization very compelling.



> [1]: That said, note that one can still passivize both 1a and 2a using the "anticipatory it" construction.
> 
> 1c. It was expected that he'd fall asleep.
> 2c. It was expected he'd fall asleep.​



Interesting that you mention this. I was actually wondering if we should analyzed it as: "kyaa tum ko yeh maaluum hai, ki raaj kahaaN hai?" with an ellided "yeh", which would be the Hindi structure parallel to 1c/2c. In any case what is the role of the subordinate clause in these examples? Apposition to the "anticipatory it/yeh"?


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## aevynn

Ah, yes, an omitted "anticipatory _yeh_" does seem like a reasonable explanation too!



Dib said:


> In any case what is the role of the subordinate clause in these examples? Apposition to the "anticipatory it/yeh"?



Some jargon one might use to describe the syntactic relationship between the "anticipatory it/yeh" and the subordinate clause is that the pronoun is a cataphor and the subordinate clause is its postcedent. Another relevant piece of terminology is extraposition (one could say, for instance, that subordinate clauses marked with _ki_ are obligatorily extraposed).


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## MonsieurGonzalito

I would not carry too far the fact that English used "it" to express impersonal verbs. Other languages don't.
There is no antecedent / consequent relationship between "it" and "that" in the phrases above.


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## aevynn

You're certainly right that many other languages don't rely on the "dummy it" to serve as subjects of impersonal verbs, but I think the usage of "it" in examples like 1c/2c above doesn't quite qualify as a dummy it serving as the subject of an impersonal verb. Dummy its with impersonal verbs (like "What time is it?" or "It's raining") don't refer to anything at all, they just fill a grammatical hole that needs to be filled. But the "anticipatory it" does refer to something: in an example like 1c, the thing that is being expected is precisely "that he'd fall asleep." (For another example of an "anticipatory it," check out example (c) on the Wikipedia section on postcedents linked above. The sentences you mentioned earlier, "It was unknown to me...," are also examples of this same phenomenon.)


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## littlepond

Dib said:


> Interesting that you mention this. I was actually wondering if we should analyzed it as: "kyaa tum ko yeh maaluum hai, ki raaj kahaaN hai?" with an ellided "yeh", which would be the Hindi structure parallel to 1c/2c. In any case what is the role of the subordinate clause in these examples? Apposition to the "anticipatory it/yeh"?



I do interpret it like that: the "yeh" is again elided, and "raaj kahaaN hai" is merely describing the "yeh", i.e., stands in apposition. One _could_, by the way, also say "ki kyaa raaj kahaaN hai, tum ko maaluum hai?" It's not normal, but it doesn't sound odd to my ears. One cannot, however, say "kyaa tum ko ki raaj kahaaN hai maaluum hai?"

Not a linguist, by the way.


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## Au101

Assuming I have followed this discussion, I've just found what seems like quite a nice example of where the _yah_ isn't elided that might add to this discussion.

From Rupert Snell's Teach Yourself Hindi: Rishi is asking Raj where Uncle Arun's house keys are. Apparently the keys were in Sangeeta's room yesterday. Raj doesn't know where they are and the brothers begin squabbling. Raj tells Rishi he should ask Sangeeta if they were in her room yesterday and asks 'Am I Sangeeta's servant?' Rishi replies "No Raj, you're not a servant, you really are a 'raja'!" teasing him. Raj replies:



> और इस 'ऋषि' को यह भी नहीं मालूम कि घर की चाबियाँ कहाँ हैं!_
> Aur is 'ṛṣi' kō yah bhī nahīṁ mālūm ki ghar kī cābiyām̐ kahām̐ haiṁ!_


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## littlepond

^ The above "yeh" becomes necessary because of "bhii": it serves to emphasise the ignorance of Rishi. "Aur ise (yeh) maaloom nahiiN ki ..." is a matter-of-fact statement; "aur ise yeh tak/bhii maaloom nahiiN ki ..." has the emphasis/surprise/scorn.


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## marrish

Dib said:


> On a second thought, the construction with pasand is actually a bit weird, because unlike maaluum, which is an adjective in origin ("known" in Arabic, passive participle of 3-l-m, to know), pasand is a feminine noun. But in this construction ("mujhe pasand hai") it works like an adjective. Otherwise, its adjective form is "pasandiidaa" (favourite).
> 
> On a third thought, even "maaluum" seems to have a noun-usage, at least as the plural "maaluumaat", meaning "information about something" (like what a tourist guide provides you about a site). Admittedly, it is more on the Urdu side of the things, and Hindi would rather use "jaan-kaarii" (I love this word somehow ), but I found this interesting.


Perhaps this sentence points out to, yes, noun-like usage? 
میں نے جب اس سے قحط کی صورتِ حال کا معلوم کیا تو ۔۔
_maiN ne jab us se qaHt kii suurat-e-Haal kaa ma3luum kiyaa to…_


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## Dib

marrish said:


> Perhaps this sentence points out to, yes, noun-like usage?
> میں نے جب اس سے قحط کی صورتِ حال کا معلوم کیا تو ۔۔
> _maiN ne jab us se qaHt kii suurat-e-Haal kaa ma3luum kiyaa to…_



Yes, I guess so. Thank you.


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## Aryaved

हाँ मुझे *ज्ञात* है means "Yes, I know" as well. ज्ञात= मालूम


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