Levels in language understanding

You must now have understood that while the order of word arrangements is determined by the grammar rules, the meaning of the sentence in general is determined by the case relation connecting different phrases to the verb. So we can look at levels in language understanding with respect to English.    

Indian Languages

Now let us move on to Indian languages. First we will look at Hindi and then at Tamil. Consider a sentence in Hindi :

ram: n:ð rav:N: k:ð m:ara

This sentence can also be written as

rav:N: k:ð ram: n:ð m:ara

Now looking at the two sentences, we see that the meaning remains the same. Notice that there is a local word grouping where the noun ram: is shifted along with the n:ð, similarly rav:N: with k:ð. This is because, for ram: to be the agent, it is generally followed by a n:ð while a noun filling the role of an object is usually followed by a k:ð. This means that the Hindi language is a relatively free word order language, in contrast to English, which is a fixed word order language. This means that in Hindi, the grammar rules regarding word order in the sentence are more or less replaced by local word grouping.

Levels in language understanding for Hindi

ÌpÊR ÌpÎÆwÒ uÁpRÑpR

ÌpÎÆwÒ ÌpÊR uÁpRÑpR

Here we can see that the case indication is attached to the word as in <Ravananai> where <ai> indicates that <Ravanan> is the object of the action. <ai> is referred to as the case marker. Since the case markers are attached to the words themselves, the position of the words in the sentence is not critical.

Levels in language understanding for Tamil