Fake Indian accents (by an Indian)
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FAKE ACCENTS | Stand-up Comedy by Niv Prakasam
Niv even gets into the grammatical gender of "chair" (something we covered a few weeks ago) in Marathi, the main language of Mumbai.
The Marathi word for chair, खुर्ची (khurchi), is feminine gender. Therefore, when adjectives or other words modify it, they take a feminine form.
Feminine gender: खुर्ची (khurchi)
Example: The adjective for a masculine noun like 'horse' (घोडा – ghoda) would be 'काळा' (kaala), but for a feminine noun like 'chair' (खुर्ची – khurchi), the adjective changes to 'काळी' (kaali)
Etymology
Borrowed from Arabic كُرْسِيّ (kursiyy). Compare Gujarati ખુરશી (khurśī), Hindi कुरसी (kursī), Kannada ಕುರ್ಚಿ (kurci), Punjabi ਕੁਰਸੀ (kursī).
HI (Human Intelligence) before AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Selected readings
- "The gender of a key" (10/22/25)
- "The gender of gender" (6/6/25)
- "Dialect vs. accent (vs. language)" (11/30/18) — especially these two comments which are about the amazing talents of Thomas Krishna Mair and Michel Strickmann in their ability to mimic virtually any accent
Gokul Madhavan said,
November 12, 2025 @ 3:38 am
Hindi’s grammatical gender is one of the hardest things about it for Tamil speakers. But the explanation in the video for why it should be “kursī kī price” (and not “kursī kā price”) is incorrect. It’s not because kursī is feminine, but because “price” (or rather the Hindi-Urdu word qīmat that would be used here) is feminine. Possessive suffixes in Hindi, which ultimately derive from adjectivizing suffixes in Old Indo-Aryan, do not agree with the noun to which they attach (the possessor), but with the noun they modify (the possessee). This is just like French’s possessive pronouns which also agree in number and gender with the possessee, so that a male can say mon frère, ma sœur, and mes parents.
Gokul Madhavan said,
November 12, 2025 @ 9:43 pm
I was reflecting on this post overnight, since to my ears “kursī kā price” doesn’t sound wrong at all, and in fact is what I would say as well. And then it struck me that what I would actually say is “kursī kā dām”, where the grammatically masculine word dām ultimately derives from the Greek drachma. So really both the shopkeeper in the video and I were following the same logic, just using different native words as equivalents for the English word.
Michael Watts said,
November 13, 2025 @ 1:29 pm
I'm surprised that, according to the comedy bit, the Hindi word for feminine grammatical gender appears to be the English word female. This seems like something there would have been Sanskrit terminology for.
Gokul Madhavan said,
November 14, 2025 @ 7:21 am
Michael Watts: astute observation. I suspect the word “female” was used just to amp up the comedic element in a “female chair” versus a “feminine chair”. The term for feminine gender in Hindi grammar is strī-liṅg, which is borrowed wholesale from Sanskrit grammar (albeit pronounced with Hindi’s characteristic schwa deletion).