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10 votes

What are common origins of accusative case markers?

This is merely a marginal answer and I’m sure there’s a lot more data that might prove valuable, but in multiple Romance languages (at least Spanish and Romansh) the preposition a has developed into ...
Sascha Baer's user avatar
  • 3,482
10 votes
Accepted

Grammatical cases occurring only in conlangs

I think the best conlang to look for such cases is Ithkuil. http://ithkuil.net/04_case.html contains a list of all cases. My [short] research suggests that some of them (e.g. navigative for "noun ...
Cecilia's user avatar
  • 1,111
7 votes

Is it possible to make a declension system that DOESN'T limit what nouns can end in?

Ignoring the lost natlang, I'll just answer the title question: There are several possibilities to let nouns end in any phoneme of the language and still have case inflections: Most simple: Have a ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
  • 11.1k
5 votes

Do I need a Dative Case?

Yours is a very interesting and legitimate question, but in the light of what we know from the languages of the world, what you ask might not be what you mean to ask. Let me expand a bit below. To ...
Stefano's user avatar
  • 151
4 votes

Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?

The names of cases are pretty arbitrary -- there is no law that a language has to have any particular cases. Many inflected languages express functions through particular endings; for example, the ...
Oliver Mason's user avatar
  • 4,058
4 votes
Accepted

State-based analogue to distributive case

Interesting concept for a case. In my interpretation this kind of an abstract distributive case would apply in sentences like this one (a probably very clumsy reformulation of a famous first sentence ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
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3 votes
Accepted

How to create irregular pronoun paradigms

To get a disconnect that extreme between different cases of the same pronoun, there's really only one tool for the job: suppletion. Suppletion is the process where Word A gets reanalyzed as an ...
Arcaeca's user avatar
  • 539
3 votes

State-based analogue to distributive case

I suspect you could just make up a name. That's certainly a legitimate glossopoetical strategy. In English, i'd just call it a distributive sense of the state-noun and have done with it: Such-and-...
elemtilas's user avatar
  • 3,245
3 votes

Is it possible to make a declension system that DOESN'T limit what nouns can end in?

Here are some possible solutions to this problem that haven't been listed already. mark case with tone or another suprasegmental feature case disfixes have a large class of indeclinable nouns achieve ...
Greg Nisbet's user avatar
  • 1,705
3 votes

Is it possible to make a declension system that DOESN'T limit what nouns can end in?

There are some languages with unusually irregular plurals or verbal forms, but I don't think any language has something quite as stark as what you're demanding here. Mostly because, as you point out ...
Circeus's user avatar
  • 1,562
2 votes

Is it possible to make a declension system that DOESN'T limit what nouns can end in?

Any declensional system that involves suffixes will limit "what nouns can end in", because nouns can only end in the declensional terminations of that language! Even if you maximise by disallowing ...
elemtilas's user avatar
  • 3,245
2 votes

State-based analogue to distributive case

If I understand you correctly (big if there!), you are looking for a periodical state that repeats, not necessarily at the same time interval (though the two might in reality be linked) — as it ...
Oliver Mason's user avatar
  • 4,058
2 votes

Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?

Ask a Native Speaker Seriously. You can look in grammars and check out WALS and CALS, but really I'd suggest introspection. Let your inner native speaking guide show you how her language works. For ...
elemtilas's user avatar
  • 3,245
2 votes

Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?

I'd like to focus on the second title question: Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case? Yes. Hindi's oblique case comes to mind. Subject and direct objects are very common, not very ...
Vir's user avatar
  • 1,276
2 votes

Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?

Well, first of all, every language uses its cases differently. Even though both Latin and German have a "nominative" case, they're not used in exactly the same way. This means there's not ...
Draconis's user avatar
  • 4,086
1 vote

How to create irregular pronoun paradigms

Hungarian is an interesting example - the (personal) pronouns are not inflected by the (agglutinative) suffixes, but vice versa, the suffix is inflected by the pronoun. E.g. the dative suffix is -nek (...
Radovan Garabík's user avatar
1 vote

Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?

First of all, I apologize for my English. My native language is Czech. This language contains seven cases: 1. nominative, 2. genitive, 3. dative, 4. accuzative, 5. vocative, 6. locative, 7. ...
ZlyVlk's user avatar
  • 11
1 vote

Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?

The dative is indeed a very diverse case, reading some teaching grammars of languages with a dative (e.g., Latin, Classical Greek, and German) or a preposition close to the dative case (Italian and ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
  • 11.1k
1 vote

Do I need a Dative Case?

You might consider something like: "I gave you it" > "I gave it so that you recieved it" "I told you it" > "I said it so that you heard it" "I passed ...
user31355's user avatar
1 vote

Do I need a Dative Case?

Your lang, your rules. But generally speaking, no, you don't need a dative case. Funny thing is, you don't even need a dative case even if you were to wrack your brain and come up with handfuls of ...
elemtilas's user avatar
  • 3,245
1 vote

Is it possible to make a declension system that DOESN'T limit what nouns can end in?

In my opinion, the obvious first step is having a base form (be it nominative, accusative, ergative, absolutive or intransitive) with a null ending so that the root form with all its final sound ...
Jan's user avatar
  • 874

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