Welcome to Gaia! ::

I've looked at the Language Construction Kit but it hasn't helped much, could anyone give me some help please?

could you just go over the basics, thats all I need right now.

Yes, case systems are part of grammar. Actually, I always call them "grammatical cases," and I think that's the preferred term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case
... is always a great place to start.

If you want a nutshell definition, a case is a form of a noun denoting a different function in the sentence. Grammatical case is, in many ways, analogous to verb tense.



For example, let's say "skarn" means person. Then, let's say that any noun ending in "n" is in the subjective case (aka Nominative case), which means that that's the form used when the noun is the subject in a sentence. In many languages, nouns are listed in subjective case, much like how verbs are often listed in the infinitive as a sort of default form.

Then you can say "adding 'ar' changes a noun to accusative case, which makes it a direct object (a noun which receives direct action from the subject via the verb).

So then, if you want to say a sentence like "The tall person hit the short person," the first word for person would be "skarn" since that's the subject of the sentence, and the second word for person would be "skarnar" since that word is the direct object in the sentence.


---

I know this is probably confusing, but I tried my best to keep it simple. And don't worry if you can't keep track of all the different cases (there's a link to a list of cases on that wiki page). Most of us here are lucky to remember 5 or 6! XD

If you must avoid using grammar rules from English, then pick a grammatical rule, and change it to something else.

You can easily throw out many of English's primary grammatical rules, specifically word order ones, by simply changing the word order in your conlang. For example, correct English grammar might be "Tomorrow, I will go to the store at the corner," but you change it so that the correct word order in your conlang is something like "i, tomorrow, to the at corner store, will go." This method will probably very difficult if you are completely unfamiliar with any foreign grammar systems, though, and will take a lot of getting used to.

From there, you can pick a few grammatical cases and leave the word order flexible, or maybe set the word order in stone so that it makes no sense out of order. Just FYI, English is considered "SVO" word order by default (Subject-Verb-Object). The changed example I gave was more of an "SOV" (Subject-Object-Verb) word order. You can try any combination such as OVS or OSV or VOS. You can search these TLA (three letter acronyms :b ) in wikipedia for more info.



It would be a really good idea to familiarize yourself with all the basic grammatical concepts like parts of speech, basic grammatical cases (if you choose to use them) and syntax stuff like phrases, predicates, copula verbs, etc (there should be wikipedia pages for each of these things).

Then go out and search for quick primers on foreign languages to see how other languages work. Take some time to compare grammar between vastly varied languages such as English (in comparison to the others), Mandarin, Greek, Arabic and Russian -- just to name a few.

You don't need to actually learn any new languages, just pick up useful ideas and knowledge.