An observation on Bengali Culture: Are you married?

This is a fairly common question. Now I’m no linguist, but I think the response is quite interesting. In Bangla there are many compound verbs where a noun is added to a verb. So in the case of marriage, the word biye is added to a verb. The interesting thing is that the verb added depends on your gender. Men respond with a conjugation of biye kor and women with biye hobe. Kor translates as to do and hobe as am. The observation is that men do marriage and women are married. From a grammatical standpoint, men respond with an active form and woman have a passive form. As one coming from a “proactive” society where gender inclusiveness is valued, the knee jerk reaction is that everybody should use the active tense–Marriage should be active not passive. However, in Bangla, active refers to a single point in time passive is a general state the implication being that for men, marriage is an act that happens a single time while with women it’s a continuous state.