Editing Marathi language (section)

== Grammar ==
{{Main|Marathi grammar}}
Marathi grammar shares similarities with other modern [[Indo-Aryan languages]]. [[Jainism|Jain]] Acharya [[Hemachandra]] is the grammarian of [[Maharashtri Prakrit]]. The first modern book exclusively concerning Marathi grammar was printed in 1805 by [[William Carey (missionary)|William Carey]].

Marathi employs [[agglutinative]], [[inflectional]] and [[Analytic (linguistics)|analytical]] forms.<ref name="Bhosale et al"/> Unlike most other Indo-Aryan languages, Marathi has kept three [[grammatical gender]]s: masculine, feminine and neuter. The primary word order of Marathi is [[subject–object–verb]]<ref>{{cite web|url=http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_mhi |title=Wals.info |publisher=Wals.info |access-date=9 May 2013}}</ref> Marathi follows a [[split-ergative]] pattern of verb [[Agreement (grammar)|agreement]] and [[case marking]]: it is ergative in constructions with either [[perfective]] transitive verbs or with the obligative ("should", "have to") and it is nominative elsewhere.{{sfn|Dhongde|Wali|2009|pp=179–80}} An unusual feature of Marathi, as compared to other [[Indo-European languages]], is that it displays [[clusivity|inclusive and exclusive we]], common to the [[Austroasiatic languages|Austroasiatic]] and [[Dravidian languages]]. Other similarities to Dravidian include the extensive use of [[participial construction]]s<ref name="Bhosale et al">{{Citation
| last1  = Bhosale
| first1 = G.
| last2  = Kembhavi
| first2 = S.
| last3  = Amberkar
| first3 = A.
| last4  = Mhatre
| first4 = M.
| last5  = Popale
| first5 = L.
| last6  = Bhattacharyya
| first6 = P.
| contribution = Processing of Kridanta (Participle) in Marathi 
| year = 2011
| title = Proceedings of ICON-2011: 9th International Conference on Natural Language Processing
| publisher = Macmillan Publishers, India
| contribution-url = http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~pb/papers/icon11-marathi-kridant.pdf
}}</ref> and also to a certain extent the use of the two [[anaphoric pronoun]]s {{transliteration|mr|swətah}} and {{transliteration|mr|apəṇ}}.{{sfn|Dhongde|Wali|2009|p=263}} Numerous scholars have noted the existence of [[Dravidian languages|Dravidian]] linguistic patterns in the Marathi language.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Polomé|first1=Edgar C.|title=Reconstructing Languages and Cultures|publisher=Walter De Gruyter|page=521|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DIj-nZWsX_0C&q=dravidian+marathi&pg=PA521|isbn=9783110867923|date=1 January 1992}}</ref>