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Telugu grammar

Grammar of the Telugu language

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The first treatise on Telugu grammar (Telugu: వ్యాకరణము, romanized: vyākaraṇamu), the Andhra Shabda Chintamani (Telugu: ఆంధ్ర శబ్ద చింతామణి, romanized: Āndhra śabda cintāmaṇi) was written in Sanskrit by Nannayya, who is considered the first poet (ādikavi) and grammarian of the Telugu language, in the 11th century CE. In the 13th century, Andhra Bhasha Bhushanamu, a foundational Telugu grammar and vocabulary work, was written by the 13th-century scholar Mulaghatika Ketana, and is considered the first comprehensive Telugu grammar written in Telugu. In the 19th century, Paravastu Chinnaya Suri wrote a simplified work on Telugu grammar called Bāla Vyākaraṇam (lit. Children's grammar), borrowing concepts and ideas from Nannayya, in Telugu.

According to Nannayya, language without 'Niyama' or the language which does not adhere to Vyākaranam is called Grāmya (lit of the village) or Apabhraṃśa, is unfit for literary usage. All literary texts in Telugu follow the Vyākaraṇam. Following pure telugu movement to minimise loan words and maximize usage of native telugu that is naatu telugu, a melimi telugu version is introduced where the term melimi means "fine" or excellence". grammar for this version is telugu nudikattu

Nouns

Telugu is more inflected than other literary Dravidian languages. Telugu nouns are inflected for number (singular, plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and grammatical case (nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative and vocative).

There is a rich system of derivational morphology in Telugu. Verbs and adjectives can be converted into nouns by adding a variety of suffixes.

Example:

  • verb

ceyu + ika = ceyika(action)

  • adjective

manchi + thanam = manchithanam (goodness)

Gender

Telugu has three genders, which govern verb agreement:

  • masculine ( puliṅgamu),
  • feminine (strī liṅgamu),
  • neuter (napunsaka liṅgamu).

In Telugu the occurrence of the suffix (–ḍu) almost always encodes masculine gender. For example:

  • tammuḍu (younger brother),
  • mukhyuḍu (important man),
  • Rāmuḍu (Rāma),
  • nāyakuḍu (leader).

However, there are nouns that do not end in (-ḍu) that belong to the masculine class. For example:

  • annayya (elder brother),
  • māmayya (uncle).

Most of the words ending in -ḍu are borrowings from Sanskrit words ending in -a, and therefore the feminine forms of these words are equivalent to the Sanskrit words.

Sometimes, a word ending in -ḍu is feminized by adding the suffix -ālu to the root. The -a ending of the root becomes -ur. This phenomenon is known as the rugāgama sandhi.

Neuter-gendered words usually contain the suffix -amu. This suffix descends from the Old Telugu suffix -ambu and is increasingly losing the final -u to become -aṁ. These neuter words are often borrowed from Sanskrit words ending in -a or -u. The final -a usually becomes -amu, and the final -u becomes -uvu.

However, Telugu sometimes uses the same forms for singular feminine and neuter genders– the third person pronoun (అది ) can be used to refer to animals and objects.

Number

Anything with quantity one is singular (ekavachanam). Anything more than one in number is called plural (bahuvachanam), as in English. Formation of the plural stem, however, is relatively complicated, although the ending is centred on variants -lu or -ḷu.

In Telugu the plural is also used to as an honorific. Some nouns are always plural and some are always singular. For example, water (nīru) and milk (pālu) are always plural.

God (bhagavantudu), sun (suryudu), earth (bhūmi), and moon (chandrudu) are always singular form.

Plural formation

Numerals

Cardinal numbers and quantifiers in Telugu vary based on whether or not the noun being counted is human, or non-human. The numbers from 1-7 have unique forms between the human and non-human forms, whereas numbers greater than 7 simply use the measure word మంది mandi to denote number. Ordinal numbers merely replace the final vowel of the non-human cardinal form with -ō and do not vary between human and non-human nouns.

Case

A Grammar of Modern Telugu by Krishnamurti and Gwynn (1985), which focuses on a grammatical description of modern spoken Telugu rather than classical literary Telugu, presents a simple analysis of grammatical case, in comparison with classical Telugu:

Only the nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative cases are regularly used, and the locative case is formed using the suffixes -lō, -lōpala which were originally placed in the Genitive case by traditional grammarians to fit into the Sanskrit case scheme. The instrumental+sociative case suffix is -tō (while classical has -cēn/-cētan for instrumental and -tōn/-tōḍan for sociative); the colloquial suffixes for ablative case are -nuṇḍi/-nuñci. Ablative case is also used for comparative statements in colloquial Telugu, for which the suffixes are -kaṇṭe/-kannā. Another usage of ablative case is to indicate 'because of' noun, where the suffix -valla (classical -valanan) is used. The benefactive suffixes in classical (-koṟakun/-kai) are completely replaced by -kōsam in modern colloquial Telugu. The genitive form of a noun is defaulted to its oblique stem, i.e., oblique stem of a noun serves as its genitive case by default, though an explicit suffix -yokka is used in formal contexts (refer to oblique stem formation below).

The accusative case suffix is -ni/-nu, with the former always used after final syllables containing -i-, and the latter elsewhere but freely varies with -ni. The intervening vowel is sometimes deleted between -ḍ-, -l-, -n-, -ṇ-, -r- and the suffix, e.g. mimmala "you (plural) + -ni → mimmalni, vāḍi "him" + -ni → vāṇṇi (*-ḍni → -ṇṇi).

In neuter nouns, the nominative singular ending -am changes before the accusative and dative case suffixes, such that the combined forms of these endings are neuter accusative singular -ānni (← *-ānini) and neuter dative singular -āniki.

Oblique stem formation

Formation of the oblique stem, also usually but not always the same as the genitive (by default homophonous unless noted), is relatively complicated just like pluralization. The plural oblique stem, however, is either -la or -ḷa.

Examples

Only nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative cases are shown here.

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