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In English, nouns are pretty boring.
Sure, they identify classes of people, places, things, and ideas,
But apart from that, they don't really do a whole lot.
Other languages make their nouns work a lot harder...
...by employing a thing called a “noun case system”.
A system of nominal inflections which encode a noun's function...
...and/or its relation to other words.
The most common cases are: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, and Dative.
The Nominative case marks the subject of a sentence
We know “the man” is a subject of this sentence because word order
But a language with a nominative case may explicitly mark this with some sort of affixation.
Usually a suffix.
Similarly, the accusative case marks the object of a sentence.
The dative case marks the indirect object of a sentence,
The receiver of something. In this case, the dog is the receiver of the bone
So, The mana fave the dogi a boneo.
Aaaand, finally, the genitive case marks possession.
You know, the Saxon genitive. AKA, English's “ ’s ”
Old English had an extensive case system but now all that's left is just some vestigial stuff.
Those are the 4 basic cases. Question: Why? In a word...
...Freedom.
With everything marked, word order is no longer crucial. Any permutation of the sentence...
...will still convey the same meaning
This frees up word order to do more subtle things like express...
...fine grain tonal differences.
So that's noun cases and coding sentence level stuff, but there's a little...
...more to it than that
Ever notice how in English a ton of small clarifying words often precede nouns
Noun cases can soak these up and...
...bake them onto the nouns.
In Finnish, there's this thing called “Locative case” which encodes, wait for it...
...Location.
Think gluing in, on, at, and by to the noun.
So, “The man walked the dog” will become:
“The mana walked dogby”
Finnish actually goes a step further and spits its locative case into 6...
...separate cases. 3 internal, and 3 external.
Turkish has an ablative case which encodes, amongst other things, motion away from something.
Think: from. “The man came from the city” becomes
“The mana came cityab”
Russian's instrumental case marks the means by which a subject does a thing.
Think: with, by, and using. “The man poked the dog with a bone”
”The mana poked dogi bonin”.
There's a whole ton more, links in the dooblidoo.
TL;DR, noun cases hard-bake functionality and/or prepositions to the nouns.
Upshot is free word order and compactness.
Downside is noun cases are relatively complex
So, how do we create noun cases...
...for our conlangs?
Step 1: Choose your cases. Languages with cases tend to follow this hierarchy.
If your language has a locative case,
it will likely have everything proceeding it.
But as always, there are exceptions.
Choose as many cases as you'd like.
German has 4, Latin has 6, Finnish has 15, Hungarian 18, Hell, the conlang Ithkuil has somewhere around 92 of them.
Or, you could totally invent your own cases based off English prepositions for example.
For the sake of time, I'll go with Nominative & Accusative.
Step 2: Make up rules as to where the inflections will occurr
Earlier, I demonstrated noun only inflection, but we have other options...
...at our disposal. Like article only inflection.
Here, the noun triggers the inflection but it manifests itself on the associated articles.
Or, article & noun inflection.
Or, a mixture.
Like in german: Der hund (n.) Changes to Den hund (a.) and Des hundes (g.)
Whichever you choose, be aware that inflected nouns tend to demand agreement.
That is, any word modifying the noun.
Like adjectives, for example, need to undergo similar inflections.
They needn't look the same,
There just needs to be a defined way in which the words...
...associated with a noun interact
Again, for time reasons, I'll go with noun-only suffixes,
But you're free to go with whichever type of affixation works for you
Step 3: get declining
Verbs Conjugate Nouns Decline
Same kind of thing, different name
Set up a grid, cases on the side, noun forms on top,
start inventing, and soon you'll get a set of rules that will look something like this
Which works perfectly, until you run into a word ending in a vowel
In which case, you may need to set up a second declension system for vowel final nouns.
Like so
Essentially, group your nouns into as many, or as few categories as you'd like depending on...
...form, and come up a sceme for each group
You can go way deep here.
Latin has 5 declension schemes based on gender and stem endings.
That said, this is all a bit...
...too perfect. Natlangs are messier. Things merge,
get dropped, anomalies creep in, etc. So,
Last step is how natlangs employ cases,
and build in some quirks based off your research.
And that is how you go about constructing a simple noun case system.
DONE.
Now, there is much, much, much, much, much more we can do with nouns, but those are all stories...
...for another day.
Good morning interweb, there are building works going on here...
...at the moment so I apologize for any and...
...all noises you hear in this vlog.
1. Consider this video a part 1 in a 2 part...
...series about nouns. As you are watching this, I am already...
...working on the second video so it should be out when the next...
...next week-week and a half.
Hopefully. Disasters not withstanding
So, apologies for delaying getting this one out, I was working on two videos at the one time
This could actually be my job.