Hindi verbs and gender agreement

[Šọ̈́gala]

I don't know much about Hindi, but it's apparent right from the beginning of the Pimsleur recording that Hindi verbs agree with their subject for gender. I found this surprising because—unless I'm having a severe senior moment—there's nothing like that in Sanskrit or any other ancient Indo-European language I'm familiar with. So, diachronically, how did Hindi develop morphology for marking gender on verbs? I'm curious about the path of grammaticalisation.

[jmcd]

One quick guess would be the morphology on the past participles (most participles agreed with nouns in Sanskrit, just as adjectives did)

[linguoboy]

Not just past participles but present ones as well. Most Hindi TAM combinations are formed by means of periphrasis with the copula (a development which should be readily comprehensible to any speaker of English).

[Richard W]

I don't know much about Hindi, but it's apparent right from the beginning of the Pimsleur recording that Hindi verbs agree with their subject for gender. I found this surprising because—unless I'm having a severe senior moment—there's nothing like that in Sanskrit or any other ancient Indo-European language I'm familiar with. So, diachronically, how did Hindi develop morphology for marking gender on verbs? I'm curious about the path of grammaticalisation.

The past participle in Latin perfect (semi-)deponents and passive verbs agrees with the subject. This also occurs with the Greek periphrastic forms - the 3rd plural mediopassive perfect is obligatorily periphrastic.

The better known case of Hindi agreement is past tense verbs agreeing with their objects and the subject being put in the 'ergative'. These are assumed to derive from a passive construction. I believe this construction is considered acceptable in Sanskrit.

There may also be some examples of agreement with the gender of the subject in the Sanskrit periphrastic future, but I couldn't find any examples.

[Šọ̈́gala]

Fascinating points, thanks! I had not considered that a verb could pick up noun morphological categories because it is a reverbalised deverbal. Fiendishly simple! I should have guessed from the presence of the copula.