10
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
- 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 ...
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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 ...
- 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 ...
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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 ...
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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-...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
- 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 (...
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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. ...
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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 ...
- 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 ...
- 11
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 ...
- 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 ...
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