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every language needs to solve the
problem of how to specify who's doing
what to whom in any given phrase in the
last video in this series we discussed
how this can be accomplished by marking
the verb with affixes that agree with at
least one of the arguments in person
number and/or gender but another equally
viable strategy for marking rules is to
use case marking in which nouns are
appended with markers that signify the
role they play in the phrase whether it
be the subject direct object indirect
object or the object of an adposition
consider how in English if we take a
sentence like I saw her and reverse the
role of the subject and object the
arguments undergo a change in form to
reflect their change in roles in English
this only happens among pronouns but in
many languages all nouns exhibit this
sort of morphological change about 60%
of languages employ some form of case
marking though there's a lot of scope
for variation on how these systems work
case morphology almost always evolves
from adpositions or sometimes adverbs or
demonstrative z' that become used to
mark the grammatical relationships
between the verb and its arguments over
time the mark has become phonological e
dependent on the nouns they modify and
become dedicated case affixes some
languages like classical nahuatl and
mohawk have systems that may
superficially seem like case marking
where an ad positions can suffix onto
the nouns they modify but these sorts of
systems usually aren't considered case
systems in the truest sense because most
of the time the suffix form is optional
and there's no specific marking for core
arguments however once these ad
positions become associated with their
dependent nouns to the point that the
nouns can't occur without them they
become full-fledged case markers the
number of cases a language may
distinguish can vary broadly from only
two or three like in Persian and
Romanian to over a dozen like Finnish
and Hungarian however
cross-linguistically some case
distinctions are more commonly made than
others the subject of a phrase will most
often be placed in the nominative case
which in most
we'll be left unmarked while the direct
object will be placed in the accusative
case which may come from ad positions
like to at or against conversely in
Agata systems the subject of an
intransitive verb and the direct object
of a transitive verb will both be placed
in the absolutive case which is also
usually left unmarked while the agent of
a transitive verb will be placed in the
ergative case which may evolve from ad
positions like by with or from the
genitive case is used to mark the noun
as the possessor of another noun the
phrase usually one immediately adjacent
to it and sometimes also marks the noun
is the object of certain ad positions
the genitive usually evolves from ad
positions like of related to with or
from the dative case marks the indirect
object or beneficiary of the verb and
can also sometimes be used to indicate
motion towards the noun and
appropriately derives from ad positions
like for or toward the instrumental
marks the noun as the means by which the
verb is carried out and may come from an
ad position like with or by means of the
instrumental sometimes overlaps with a
committed case which marks accompaniment
or association with an adjacent noun
many languages will use the same
morphology to mark the instrumental and
commit a t'v and leave it up to context
to disambiguate things think about how
in English the word with can be used to
express either instrumentality or
accompaniment the locative case marks
location at in or on the noun and as you
might expect usually comes from an ad
position conveying a similar meaning and
the ablative case marks movement away
from the noun usually coming from an ad
position meaning from many languages
will make use of other more specific
cases but these are the most common
cases cross-linguistically these cases
also form a hierarchy from most common
to least common so if a language has any
of the cases on this list it will
usually also have all the cases above it
however the specific usage of each of
these cases as well as the terminology
assigned to it will vary considerably
from language to language and quite
frequently any
in case we'll have additional and
non-canonical uses beyond its default
encoding often a single case marker can
be used to mark more than one role for
instance in Manchu the genitive and
instrumental are encoded by the same
marker as are the locative and the
dative the various functions that any
given case marker can perform will
largely be determined by its lexical
source for example if a language evolves
a genitive case from an adposition that
means something like width then perhaps
the genitive carries with it an
association of relatedness so it might
also fill the role of a committed case
or perhaps instead the genitive evolves
from an odd position meaning away from
and so may come to also fill the role of
an ablative case when making a case
system for a naturalistic Kahn Lang it's
worth deciding the lexical source of
each of your cases from the very
beginning and letting their
implicational meanings inform their
usage sometimes the case is assigned to
the core arguments of a phrase will vary
based on the semantics of the verb
quirky subject is a phenomenon where in
a subject is marked with a case other
than the expected nominative most often
when the subject has low agency or is in
some way both agent like and patient
like a very common variation of quirky
subject is to assign the dative case to
the subjects of verbs of experience or
sensation or verbs that encode a change
of state there are even relics of this
in English as in the archaic methinks in
some languages like Sadri the case of
the subject may also change to reflect
the event structure or the tense and
aspect properties of the verb among her
--get of languages like Basque and
Georgian the subjects of most
intransitive verbs are marked with the
absolutive or nominative as one would
expect but some high agency intransitive
verbs mark their subjects in the
ergative similar case alternations can
occur with the direct object as well in
Finnish marking the direct object with
the accusative case implies a completed
or successful action while using the
positive or genitive cases implies an
incomplete or a result ative meaning
similarly differential object marking is
a phenomenon found in many languages
we're the semantic properties of any
given direct object determines some
aspect of its marking usually related to
animus E or definiteness in Turkish and
Amharic the direct object is only marked
with the accusative if it's definite
otherwise the nominative is used while
in Malayalam the accusative marker only
goes on animate nouns once again for
your own con Lang think about the
etymology of your case suffix is to help
extrapolate any additional uses they
might have beyond the number and usage
of cases another point of variation
among case systems is where the case
marking occurs case markers sometimes
exist as a series of distinct particles
separate from the noun stem like in
Japanese Manchu and Korean although its
more common for case markers to exist as
a fixes however while these affixes
usually occur directly on the noun stem
this isn't the only possibility in some
languages like Basque key suffixes only
appear on the final word in the noun
phrase whatever part of speech it may be
it's also very common for modifiers like
adjectives demonstratives and articles
to take case markers to agree in case
where the nouns they modify one
interesting thing to note however is
that marking case with suffixes is
overwhelmingly more common than using
prefixes even in otherwise exclusively
prepositional languages wherever the
case markers occur they're very likely
to become phonologically reduced over
time through frequent use the precise
way the case markers get reduced may be
influenced by the phonology of the noun
stem and so every now and may follow one
of several patterns or declensions
based on the form of the case markers
they take in old and or heavily fusional
systems like Latin Greek and Russian
these declensions may be further divided
into finer patterns based on gender and
number once a language has case marking
new ad positions may evolve to replace
those that became case markers or to
convey more specific meanings than the
case markers alone one very common
pathway is for new ad positions to
evolve from nouns used in possessive
phrases especially body parts and since
they derive from possessive
Fraser's they'll frequently assign the
genitive case to the nouns they modify
or another common possibility is for new
ad positions to evolve from verbs which
will therefore assign to the noun
whichever case they had previously
assigned to their objects sometimes a
single ad position will encode different
meanings depending on which case the
noun it modifies is placed in in Latin
using the preposition in where the
accusative case creates the meaning of
motion into the noun while using the
same preposition with the ablative case
instead encodes a position at in or on
the noun with further evolution these
complementary ad positions may get a
fixed onto the inflected noun to become
a new compound case marker with a more
specific meaning in old Lithuanian an ad
position meaning act or with became
suffix to the locative and genitive to
create the Edessa van Dallas if cases
respectively as well as gaining new
cases languages can lose cases over time
as well often due to phonological
changes that result in multiple case
markers having identical phonological
forms at one point Latin had a separate
locative case to encode position and
location but over time sound changes
resulted in it becoming identical to the
genitive and dative and most declensions
and so the locative was almost
completely lost in classical Latin
outside of a small set of common words
and the locative x' meaning was replaced
by the ablative case in conjunction with
the preposition in if enough of these
sorts of changes take place it's even
possible that the entire case system can
be leveled with new constructions
evolving to convey the meanings of the
lost case markers as happened in both
the Romance languages and in English if
a language does lose its case marking it
will need to rely on some other
mechanism to mark roles which in the
case of English and the Romance
languages took the form of a shift to a
stricter word order supplemented by the
verb agreement retained from the older
languages
remember it's comparatively rare for a
language to rely on just one of these
role marking strategies so when creating
a case system for a con Lang think about
what other role marking systems might be
used to reinforce meanings so in summary
if you're looking to create a
naturalistic case system for a
online decide what roles the system is
going to mock and where the marking is
going to occur evolve case markers by a
fixing add positions or other modifiers
to noun stems decide what other meanings
each case marker might be used to convey
based on its lexical source and
determine how the cases interact with
any other role marking strategies the
language might have overall case marking
is a relatively easy way to clear up any
ambiguity surrounding grammatical roles
and presents the opportunity for a lot
of fun and interesting constructions if
you play around with it
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