Like all languages, Konkani has its own peculiarities.
One of its characteristics concerns the genders attributed to people and things, and the genders of the pronouns and adjectives that bear reference to those objects.
Genderly speaking, the English language is perhaps the most down to earth and matter-of-fact. People have their sexes, it seems to suggest, and animals also do, but how can things be considered as male or female? What sex qualities do inanimate objects possess? You don’t think of a table or a chair or a computer as a male or a female, do you? In other words, except for a few pronouns, the English language is almost totally impervious to genders.
But most other languages seem to be more romantic about inanimate things and like to have them personified. They portray lifeless objects and even abstract entities as masculine or feminine. To the Portuguese and the Spaniards, for instance, table (mesa) is feminine while book (livro / libro) is masculine and even problem (problema), which is an abstract noun, is masculine. Like the Iberian languages, there are several others that cast all their nouns and adjectives into one of these two genders, as if they were intent on fashioning everything after Adam and Eve as God had made them: male and female.
And then came the Hijra
But can you think of anybody trying to outsmart God? If you were told that someone actually did, I’m sure the first culprits you would think of would be Lucifer and his ten trillion devils. But let me assure you it wasn’t Lucifer or anyone else from that evil gang that tried to beat God at his game. It is the sacred languages like Latin and Sanskrit and, joining in the plot, inter alia, is our Konkani. Even though gay marriages never happened in those days, and hijras may not have been too common a sight, these languages, not satisfied with the two genders created by God, decided to create their own masterpiece of a gender: the neuter.
The original meaning of the word “neuter” is “neither”: neither this nor that, neither masculine nor feminine. In Latin and Greek and Sanskrit and Marathi and Konkani and many other languages, the neuter is in fact just as prominent as the masculine and the feminine. And so it is that perhaps the best known Konkani word, ‘kitem’ (=what) is neuter, just like ‘tem’(= it) and udok (=water). But what you may never have suspected is that even cheddum (= girl), whom you may have presumed to be feminine as she is indeed a female, has been cast into the neuter gender! Why? That’s a good question, but ours is not to ask the question why; ours is to accept it and get by.
In Konkani we decline
Konkani enjoys another characteristic that has almost been shed in today’s English. Depending on the contexts, Konkani nouns, pronouns and adjectives get declined, i.e., they undergo certain transformations which are known as inflections. To illustrate this, let us take examples of a few declensions in English that have survived only in her pronouns. If someone were to ask you what the first personal pronoun is, I’m sure you would say: ‘I’, and that’s correct. But what about the words ‘me’ and ‘my’? Don’t they refer to the first person singular too? Of course they do, and these are called inflections of I. The word me is the accusative (or dative) of ‘I’, whereas my is the possessive case of ‘I’, which itself is the nominative.
In Latin there are other cases like the ablative and the vocative cases. Fortunately in Konkani the declensions are a lot easier to learn because there are very regular rules that govern them. We shall learn more about that later, and particularly about the instrumental case mentioned below.
Digging up the past
Konkani has yet another feature which she shares with perhaps all other North Indian languages but not with European languages. When you dig into the past of a transitive verb, you may find yourself in a new grammatical world. We shall explore this small world later, so I won’t deal with it now. But I would like to give you just a glimpse of it here, presuming that you are familiar with Hindi.
If you have ever lived in Bombay where one often gets whiffs of Hindustani, you might have heard an expression like “Wah kam kiya” and, if you happen to be an expert Hindi speaker, you must have found it offensive to the ear. Why? Because certain tenses of most transitive verbs require that the subject undergo a transformation and take the instrumental case. So in the above sentence, the wah has to change to usne (the instrumental case), and the correct Hindi sentence should therefore be: not wah kam kiya but usne kam kiya. The same applies to Konkani. Taking the exact same example, to kam kelo would be wrong; for since the instrumental case of to is tannem, the correct sentence would be: tannem kam’ kelem. Notice also that kelem agrees in gender and number with the object, kam’, instead of the subject, to. However, there are some anomalous verbs like jevunk and pieunk which, though transitive, are exceptions to this rule. We shall deal with them at the appropriate time.
Conjugations made easy
If any of you have learnt Latin, you will probably remember how easy it is to form different tenses of verbs, even irregular ones, once you have learnt verbs along with their principal parts. For example, Facio-facere-feci-factum = to make. All other tenses of the verb facere, can now be formed from one of the four principal parts.
We shall treat Konkani verbs in the same way. When we present verbs in the process of building your Konkani vocabulary, we shall tail all the key tenses to the infinitive, so that when you learn a verb, you will be learning its principal parts too in one go. Thus you will be able to conjugate even irregular verbs without toil.
And with that let us move on to our main task: Konkani Grammar.