Languagle #75: Hindi
अब पछताए होत क्या, जब चिड़ियाँ चुग गईं खेत
Ab pachhtaye hot kya, jab chidiyan chug gayin khet
"What use regretting now, when the birds have already eaten the field?"
What it means
There is no point regretting it now; the chance has gone. The birds have already eaten the crop, so the time to guard the field was earlier. Said to someone who wakes up to a problem too late to fix it, much like 'shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted'.
How to say it
ub PUCH-taa-yeh hot KYAA, jub CHI-ri-yaan chug ga-YEEN KHET
A short a is the u in 'cup'. The r in chiriyaan is a quick flap with the tongue curled back, and the aan is nasal.
Word by word
- अब ub: now
- पछताए PUCH-taa-yeh: regretting
- होत क्या hot KYAA: what's the use
- जब jub: when
- चिड़ियाँ CHI-ri-yaan: the birds, little birds
- चुग गईं chug ga-YEEN: have pecked up
- खेत khet: the field
होत is an old, poetic form, a hint that the line comes from medieval verse.
Where it was found
A traditional saying, often attributed to the 15th-century poet Kabir, that has long been part of everyday Hindi.
Similar sayings
- English: No use crying over spilt milk
How to recognise Hindi
Hindi is written in Devanagari, where letters hang from a line along the top. Nepali and Marathi use the same script, so look at the small words: Hindi uses है, हैं, का, की, के, में, नहीं and और. Nepali uses छ and को, and Marathi uses आहे and the letter ळ. Urdu is essentially the same spoken language as Hindi, written in an Arabic-based script.
About the Hindi language
Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language and one of the official languages of India's central government, spoken as a first language by over 300 million people, mostly in northern and central India, and as a second language by many more. In everyday speech it is largely mutually intelligible with Urdu, but formal Hindi draws more of its vocabulary from Sanskrit. It is written in Devanagari, where the letters hang from a line running along the top of each word.