apocope of t after . For example, the adjective vas becomes vaste when inflected. Conversely, adjectives ending in -d (pronounced ) or -g (pronounced ) following a long vowel or diphthong, lose the -d and -g when inflected. For example, look at the inflected form of: In some exceptional cases, after the syncope of the intervocalic consonant, there is also an additional apocope of the inflection marker. For example, oud (old) – ou (when it precedes a noun) Broadly speaking, the same morphological changes that apply to inflected adjectives also apply in the formation of the plural of nouns. For example, the plural of vraag (question) is vrae (questions). Pronouns Remnants of the case distinction remain in the pronoun system. For example, *Archaic/regional variant **Note that and are used instead of zĳ (subject, third person plural) in several dialects of Dutch. No case distinction is made for the plural pronouns. There is often no distinction between object and possessive pronouns when used before nouns. For example, my – my, me ons – our (the alternative form onse is now considered archaic) An exception to the previous rule is the 3rd person singular masculine or neuter, where Afrikaans clearly distinguishes between hom (him) and sy (his). Likewise, the neuter pronoun dit (it, subject or object) is distinguished from the possessive sy (its), and the term hy can emphatically be used to describe inanimate objects in the same way as the feminine in English, such as in the Rooibaard hot sauce brand's slogan "hy brand mooi rooi" ("He burns beautifully red"), referring to its product's intense spice. For 3rd person plural pronouns, whereas hulle can also mean their, a variant hul is frequently used to mean "their" so as to differentiate between their and they/them. Similarly, julle when meaning your has a possessive variant jul. Syntax Word order Afrikaans has a strict word order, described in many South African text books using the so-called "STOMPI rule". The name of the rule indicates the order in which the parts of a sentence should appear. Word order in Afrikaans follows broadly the same rules as in Dutch: in main clauses, the finite verb appears in "second position" (V2 word order), while subordinate clauses (e.g. content clauses and relative clauses) have subject–object–verb order, with the verb at (or near) the end of the clause. As in Dutch and German, infinitives and past participles appear in