User:AimLook/Macedonian grammar

This article discusses the grammar of the Macedonian language.

Syntax
The canonical word order of Macedonian is AVO (Agent-Verb-Object), but word order is quite freely variable. By changing the order, it may also serve to create poetic sentiment (inversion is common in poetry).

Nominal morphology
The Macedonian nominal system distinguishes two numbers (singular and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) that inflect for number, case (only vocative) and definiteness. Definiteness is expressed by three definite articles pertaining to the position of the object (unspecified, proximate and distal) which are postfixed to the noun.

Definiteness
The article ( определен член ) is postfixed, as in Bulgarian, Albanian and Romanian. One feature that has no parallel in other standard Balkan languages is the existence of three definite articles pertaining to position of the object, unspecified, proximate (or close) and distal (or distant). Bulgarian only has the basic (unspecified) form, although three definite article forms also exist in certain Bulgarian dialects, notably the vernaculars of Tran and parts of the Rhodopes.

Nouns
Macedonian nouns ( именки ) are inflected by gender and number. A noun has one of three specific grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). Definiteness is expressed by three definite articles pertaining to the position of the object (unspecified, proximate and distal) which are postfixed to the noun.

Adjective
Adjectives ( придавки ) agree with nouns in gender, number and definiteness with the noun it is appended to and is put usually before it.

Pronouns
A pronoun ( заменка ) is a substitute for a noun or a noun phrase, or things previously mentioned or understood from the context. These are words like јас 'I', мене 'me', себе 'himself, herself', ова 'this', кој 'who, which', некој 'somebody', никој 'nobody', сите 'all', секој 'everybody'.

Based on their meaning and the function in the sentence, pronouns are classified in the following categories:

Just like nouns, Macedonian pronouns also change their forms depending on their position in a sentence, i.e., whether they function as a subject (ex. јас 'I'), a direct object (него 'him'), an object of a preposition (од неа 'from her'). This different positioning of a pronoun in a sentence is called a case (or 'падеж').

Interrogative pronouns
Interrogative pronouns ( прашални заменки ) refer to an unknown person, object, quality or quantity and agree with the noun they denote in gender and number. Personal interrogative pronouns have two cases nominative and genitive (кој, when it refers to a person and is used without a noun, also has accusative and dative forms — кого and кому respectively). They are also used with nonhuman beings (animals and objects). Quality interrogative pronouns are used for asking one to specify the word in question. They are translated in English as what/what kind of/what sort of.

There is only one interrogative pronoun for quantity — колку and it doesn't have any gender or number forms. It is used before plural nouns to ask about their quantity (then it is translated as how much/how many), and before an adjective or adverb to ask about the extent, degree, age, etc., of something or somebody (translated as how).

Comparison
Adjectives have three degrees of comparison ( споредбни степени ) — positive, comparative and superlative. The positive form is identical to all the aforementioned forms. The other two are formed regularly, by prepending the particle по and the word нај directly before the positive to form the comparative and superlative, respectively, regardless of its comprising of one or two words.

Macedonian only has one adjective that has an irregular comparative — повеќе.

Punctuation
Punctuation marks are one or two part graphical marks used in writing, denoting tonal progress, pauses, sentence type (syntactic use), abbreviations, et cetera.

Marks used in Macedonian include full stops (.), question marks (?), exclamation marks (!), commas, semicolons , colons , dashes (–), hyphens (-), ellipses (...), different types of inverted commas and quotation marks ("", '' , ‚‘, „“, »«), brackets (, [], {}) (which are in syntactical use), as well as apostrophes (',’), solidi (/), equal signs (=), and so forth.