You must have noticed that I have been repeatedly referring to the instrumental case, which is perhaps a peculiarity of all, or at least most, Indian sanskritic languages. In European languages, for example, and even in the ancient ones like Latin, there is no such thing as an instrumental case. But native speakers of Hindi, Marathi and Konkani, for example, use the instrumental without being aware of it. And its most frequent use is seen in the past tense of transitive verbs. Since most of you are probably familiar with Hindi, let me take some simple examples of its use in Hindi:
English: I always work Hindi: मै हमेशा काम करता हूं।
English: I worked yesterday Hindi: मैने कल काम किया।
Note that the मै changes to मैने which is the instrumental form of मै.
Exactly the same transformation takes place in both Marathi and Konkani when a transitive verb takes the past tense: the subject then takes the instrumental case. It is true that in Mumbai, for instance, we often hear sentences like मै काम किया. But that is obviously wrong Hindi.
Here are the instrumental cases of personal pronouns:
| Singular | Plural | |||
| 1st Person | Hanvem Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode. |
I | Amim Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode. |
We |
| 2nd Person | Tuvem Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode. |
Thou | Tumim Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode. |
You |
| 3rd Person masc. | Tannem Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode. |
He | Tamnnim Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode. |
They |
| 3rd Person fem. | Tinnem Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode. |
She | ||
| 3rd Person neut. | Tannem Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode. |
It | ||