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Marathi grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Marathi encodes each shift.
Common questions about Marathi
What can I toggle on the Marathi wheel?
Subject (person, number, AND gender, since Marathi marks all three on the verb), tense (present, past, future), aspect (habitual, progressive, perfect), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), and politeness register. Each spin rebuilds the verb form in Devanagari with a transliteration.
Why does flipping subject gender change the verb?
Marathi verbs agree with the subject's gender as well as person and number. Switching the speaker from masculine to feminine takes बोलतो to बोलते — same root, different ending.
What happens when I switch to past tense with an object?
The wheel shows Marathi's split-ergative pattern: in transitive past, the subject takes the postposition ने and the verb starts agreeing with the object instead. Intransitive past keeps normal subject agreement, so toggling transitivity surfaces the contrast directly.
Does the wheel cover honorifics?
Yes. Switching the register dial moves between plain forms (used with peers, family, juniors) and honorific forms (used with elders, strangers, professional contexts). The verb ending and the pronoun both shift.
Can I use the wheel without reading Devanagari?
Each generated sentence shows Devanagari, an IAST-style transliteration, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. You can pick up the script naturally as the same characters reappear under each spin.
Sources for Marathi
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Dhongde, R. V. & Wali, K. (2009). Marathi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (London Oriental and African Language Library 13).
- Pandharipande, R. V. (1997). Marathi. London: Routledge (Descriptive Grammars).
- Joshi, Smita (1989). "Morphological Causativization in Marathi." Stanford University.
- Hook, Peter Edwin & Pardeshi, Prashant (2013). "Prenominal Participial Phrases in Marathi." Lingua Posnaniensis 55(2).
- WALS Online — features for Marathi (wals_code mhi), citing Pandharipande 1997.
- Lele, Kaushik. Learn Marathi with Kaushik (learnmarathiwithkaushik.com).