Chapter 3.6 :
Präpositionen und Passiv
Consider some sentences: वृक्षे वानरः गच्छ. The monkey goes to the tree/inside the tree. A man sat in front of the tree A man placed a flower beside the tree The idea of being ‘in front of’ or ‘beside’ is not defined in any विभक्ति and thus cannot be translated by us. Words are required to describe relative position of nouns with respect to each other : Prepositions. One may argue that विभक्ति was supposed to eliminate this limitation. Technically, it does, since the context of going to or into something(सप्तमी) and that of emerging from something(पञ्चमी) are quite common. Even if you don’t agree with that and want to eliminate these 2 cases entirely, that’s totally fine, but consider something first… similar to the problem with plural forms or 3rd person pronouns functioning as articles, prepositions cannot be decoupled from the nouns they are ascribed to, and essentially end up forming an inseparable unit anyway. This means that they’re no different than an undefined विभक्ति on their own. On analysing languages they have fluency in, readers might be beginning to realise that these units exist everywhere, albeit in different forms. A useful contraction feature that every language should support is to allow descriptions, wherein the doer is either unknown or unimportant. For example, if someone reports a robbery, they would be forced to use a placebo doer for every sentence. Ex: ‘An unknown person broke into my house. He took my valuables. He hit me.’ This isn’t ideal, but it’s not necessary to change this. We will hence NOT be including the passive voice.