| Sing. | Plur. |
| 1. calabũ | calab |
| 2. calabē | calabō |
| 3. calihai | calihaī |
In old E.H. the future participle passive, calab, takes no suffix for any person, and is used for all persons.
The last remark leads us to a class of tenses in P. and W.H., in which a participle, by itself, can be employed for any person of a finite tense. A few examples of the use of the present and past participles will show the construction. They are all taken from Hindostani. Woh caltā, he goes; woh caltī, she goes; maī calā, I went; woh calī, she went; wē calē, they went. The present participle in this construction, though it may be used to signify the present, is more commonly employed to signify a past conditional “(if) he had gone.” It will have been observed that in the above examples, in all of which the verb is intransitive, the past as well as the present participle agrees with the subject in gender and number; but, if the verb be transitive, the passive meaning of the past participle comes into force. The subject must be put into the case of the agent, and the participle inflects to agree with the object. If the object be not expressed, or, as sometimes happens, be expressed in the dative case, the participle is construed impersonally, and takes the masculine (for want of a neuter) form. Thus, maī-nē kahā, by-me it-was-said, i.e. I said; us-nē ciṭṭhī likhī, by-him a-letter (fem.) was-written, he wrote a letter; rājā-nē shērnī-kō mārā, the king killed the tigress, lit., by-the-king, with-reference-to-the-tigress, it (impersonal) -was-killed. In the article [Prakrit] it is shown that the same construction is obtained in that language.
In E.H. the construction is the same, but is obscured by the fact that (as in the future) pronominal suffixes are added to the participle to indicate the person of the subject or of the agent, as in calat-eũ, (if) I had gone; cal-eũ, I went; mār-eũ (transitive), I struck, lit., struck-by-me; mār-es, struck-by-him, he struck. If the participle has to be feminine, it (although a weak form) takes the feminine termination i, as in māri-ũ, I struck her; calati-ũ, (if) I (fem.) had gone; cali-ũ, I (fem.) went.
Further tenses are formed by adding the verb substantive to these participles, as in H. maĩ caltā-hū, I am going; maĩ caltā-thā, I was going; maĩ calā-hū, I have gone; maĩ calā-thā, I had gone. These and other auxiliary verbs need not detain us long. They differ in the various languages. For “I am” we have P. hã, H. hū, Br. haũ, E.H. bāṭyeũ or aheũ. For “I was” we have P. sī or sā, H. thā, Br. hau or hutau, E.H. raheũ. The H. hũ is thus conjugated:—
| Sing. | Plur. |
| 1. hũ | haĩ |
| 2. hai | hō |
| 3. hai | haī |
The derivation of hã, hũ, haũ, and aheũ is uncertain. They are usually derived from the Skr. asmi, I am; but this presents many difficulties. An old form of the third person singular is hwai, and this points to the Pr. havaï, he is, equivalent to the Skr. bhavati, he becomes. On the other hand this does not account for the initial a of aheũ. This last word is in the form of a past tense, and it may be a secondary formation from asmi. The P. sī is not a feminine of sā, as usually stated, but is a survival of the Skr. āsīt, Pr. āsī, was. As in the Prakrit form, sī is employed for both genders, both numbers and all persons. Sā is a secondary formation from this, on the analogy of the H. thā, which is from the Skr. sthitas, Pr. thiō, stood, and is a participial form like calā; thus, woh thā, he was; woh thī, she was. The Br. hau is a modern past of haū, while hutau is probably by origin a present participle of the Skr. bhũ, become, Pr. huntaō. The E.H. bāṭeũ, is the Skr. vartē, Ap. vaṭṭaũ. Raheũ is the past tense of the root rah, remain.
The future participle passive is everywhere freely used as an infinitive or verbal noun; thus, H. calnā, E.H. calab, the act of going, to go. There is a whole series of derivative verbal forms, making potential passives and transitives from intransitives, and causals (and even double causals) from transitives. Thus dīkhnā, to be seen; potential passive, dikhānā, to be visible; transitive, dēkhnā, to see; causal, dikhlānā, to show.
D. Literature.—The literatures of Western and Eastern Hindi form the subject of a separate article (see [Hindostani Literature]). Panjabi has no formal literature. Even the Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs, is mainly in archaic Western Hindi, only a small portion being in Panjabi. On the other hand, the language is peculiarly rich in folksongs and ballads, some of considerable length and great poetic beauty. The most famous is the ballad of Hīr and Rānjhā by Wāris Shāh, which is considered to be a model of pure Panjabi. Colonel Sir Richard Temple has published an important collection of these songs under the title of The Legends of the Punjab (3 vols., Bombay and London, 1884-1900), in which both texts and translations of nearly all the favourite ones are to be found.
Authorities.—(a) General: The two standard authorities are the comparative grammars of J. Beames (1872-1879) and A. F. R. Hoernle (1880), mentioned in the article [Indo-Aryan Languages]. To these may be added G. A. Grierson, “On the Radical and Participial Tenses of the Modern Indo-Aryan Languages” in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. lxiv. (1895), part i. pp. 352 et seq.; and “On Certain Suffixes in the Modern Indo-Aryan Vernaculars” in the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen for 1903, pp. 473 et seq.