Geeta called me up after a really long time, maybe 10 years, it is Covid which has spurned her into action in getting in touch with old acquaintances (who are old!) …
Almost at the beginning she had asked me aur bacche? (‘and kids?’) to which of course I responded by talking about our only child. I realised soon after that such a reduced question was in fact very effectively employed in that context of the conversation, that is, when you’re calling someone up after a decade. It is on the one hand an information seeking question although the form of the question literally asks about the well-being of your children. But what it really seeks is information regarding the number of kids a person has. So by asking one question you get two possible answers: the information about the number of kids as well as their current status of well-being; for example, your answer could be: ‘both of them are OK’ or ‘Yeah, she’s OK too’.
Of course, what such a question cannot ensure is any information regarding the gender of the children in case the person has more than one. In order to find out the gender, the most appropriate question would be laRkaa-laRkii? (‘boy-girl?’), which is not great in Hindi but sometimes acceptable, or indeed, laRke-laRkiyã? (‘boys-girls?’), which is better. However, by including the gender through lexical choice in the reduced form of the question (i.e. ‘boy/girl’ instead of ‘child’), now we have sacrificed the number-seeking intention—here indicating only singular in the first one and plural in the second. In some ways, therefore, this is a ‘wrong’ form of the question in such a context of meeting/ talking after a long time. These choices also additionally assumes that you know that the person has not only more than one child but children of both sexes, at least when the singular form is used.
It’s a bit like saying, you can’t have breakfast in pajamas! ‘What nonsense!’, most others would say.
Tanmoy
As an aside, if we shift our attention momentarily to the English translations of the reduced questions, we notice a minor but robust difference between Hindi and English. Whereas the forms of the latter two questions in Hindi is boy(s)-girl(s), the English translations must consistently use the conjunction ‘and’. I say the difference is robust, i.e. inserting the conjunction in Hindi and dropping it in English are both absolutely unacceptable — laRke aur laRkiyã is unidiomatic and “wrong” for the context and the conversational logic, and *boy(s)-girl(s) is simply unproduceable in any context in English.
Note further that simply adding an ‘and’ (or ‘or’, the disjunction) in English doesn’t help, although it is now producible but is inappropriate under the context of the above conversation. That is, after a bit of chit-chat, you simply cannot ask, ‘and boys and girls?’, you may helpfully follow it up with, ‘how are they?’ to make it more palatable but it would also mean that you are not really seeking any substantial information regarding number or gender as you already are aware of the fact that the person has both gendered and plural number of children in each gender—and thus, inappropriate under the context.
The simple solution in English to repair *boy(s)-girl(s) is to add a quantifier any in the front, in addition to the conjunction ‘and’, of course—too many entry rules, wouldn’t you say? It’s a bit like saying, you can’t have breakfast in pajamas! ‘What nonsense!’, most others would say. One could do the same in Hindi, but it’s not required. In both cases though, the marker now has to be an ‘or’ rather than an ‘and’. Meaning wise the reason is clear: when using any you are not adding, but picking one or the other, obviously therefore ‘or’ and not ‘and’. But grammar wise, it is not obvious why using any would require using ‘or’. An exactly opposite requirement is noticed when using a different quantifier like both, its use obligatorily triggers the use of ‘and’ (and not ‘or’), for obvious reasons.
We have moved away from bacche, instead, in this latter group of usages, we have lost the advantage of seeking information minimally (and politely) by using (aur) bacche? in Hindi. Rather, by asking about “(any) boy(s) and/or girl(s)”, nothing is now left to imagination – no characters are fictitious or imaginary here anymore! Going back to bacche ‘children’, it is in fact the masculine plural indicator –e at the end of the word by overwriting the gender information (masculine), opens the door for the possibility of multiple characters to enter the room—itself ending up playing the politeness function. It’s very much a part of the grammar of the language and not some knee-jerk ‘ungrammatical’ reaction to political over-correction of using the plural ‘they’ to avoid oh-ever-so-hateful gendered pronouns like ‘she’, or worse, ‘he’!
ekushé 