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Telugu grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Telugu encodes each shift.
Common questions about Telugu
What can I toggle on the Telugu wheel?
Subject (person, number, gender on third person), tense (past, present, future), aspect (simple, progressive, perfect), mood (declarative, question, command), polarity, definiteness, and a నువ్వు / మీరు register dial. Each spin rebuilds the verb in Telugu script with a transliteration.
How are tense, aspect, and person stacked on a single Telugu verb?
Telugu verbs are agglutinative: a single form carries the stem plus suffixes for aspect, tense, and person / number / gender, in that order. Toggling any one of those dimensions adds or swaps a suffix on the same root word.
How does the నువ్వు / మీరు register dial work?
నువ్వు (nuvvu) is intimate or used with juniors; మీరు (mīru) is plural and also formal singular. Switching register flips the pronoun and the verb ending, and addressing one elder or stranger uses మీరు with a plural-shaped verb.
Why does the third-person verb sometimes carry gender?
Telugu marks gender on third-person verb forms: అతను 'he' takes a masculine ending; ఆమె 'she' takes a non-masculine ending; impersonal and human-plural forms collapse into a different shape. Toggling third-person gender on the wheel rewrites the suffix.
Can I use the wheel without reading Telugu script?
Each generated sentence shows Telugu script, a transliteration, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. The same characters reappear under each spin so the script becomes familiar over time.
Sources for Telugu
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.
- Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju & Gwynn, J. P. L. (1985). A Grammar of Modern Telugu. Oxford University Press (480 pp.). — The definitive modern reference grammar — phonology, morphology, syntax; replaces Caldwell's 150-year-old Dravidian grammar as standard reference. [via static/grammar-library/tel/krishnamurti-gwynn-1985-grammar-modern-telugu.pdf]