Grammatical Cases in my Latest Conlang | Page 1 | Help! | Guild Forums

Xeigrich
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Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 3:45 am

I'm looking for some input on the grammatical cases of my latest conlang.

Here're the cases, straight from the thread...

Grammatical Cases

1. Nominative (subject of finite/conjugated verb or copula)

|the boy| goes
|a house| is
|women| are

2. Accusative (direct object of trans verb)

hit |the boy|
bake |a cake|
give |books|
the murder |of the king| (OR |the king's| murder)
----*ONLY IF the king was murdered
----*Marks the experiencer or patient of an action noun
take this sword and kill |the dragon|
-----LIT. take this sword then kill |the dragon|

3. Dative (indirect object of transitive verb; to/for)

gave a book |to the boy| (OR gave |the boy| a book)
baked a cake |for the boy| (OR baked |the boy| a cake)
kill the king |for me| (when indicating benefactor)
chop the onions |for the soup| (when indicating purpose or use)
take this sword for killing |the dragon| (purpose, intent)

4. Genitive (indicates "of the" relationship; possession or relation)

shoes |of the boy| (OR the |boy's| shoes)
a stack |of books|
the murder |of(by) the killer| (the killer's murder)
----**ONLY IF the killer did the murdering
----**Marks the agent of an action noun

5. Prepositional (indicates the object of a prepostion)

at |the store|
up |the mountain|
around |the castle|
in |the house|
under |a tree|

6. Inclusive (marks nouns included with a noun of another case)

the man(NOM) and his(GEN) |wife|(INC) went to the shop(PRP)
the king(NOM) killed a dragon(ACC) with only a sword(PRP) and |a shield|(INC)

NOTE:Inclusive case also marks all nouns in a compound noun before the final noun in the compound. See compound noun rules.
the king(NOM) gave the hero(DAT) the dragon(INC)-killer(INC)-country(INC)-conqueror(INC)-sword(ACC)
the |spear|(INC)-Danes(NOM) burned our(GEN) homes(ACC) and crops(INC) and meadhall(INC)

7. Vocative (used for directly addressing someone

lo, Hrathmyl!
Hrathmyl!
yes, my |king|!

*With a noun of action, sometimes a verb functioning as a noun, the Accusative case is still used to indicate to whom or to what the action is done to (performed on). In this situation, the noun taking the Accusative case would be functioning as a patient or experiencer as if it were the object of a verb, and the action noun can be any case. See ***

**With a noun of action, sometimes a verb functioning as a noun, the Genitive case is still used to indicate who or what the action is done by (performed by). In this situation, the noun taking the Genitive case would be functioning as an agent as if it were the subject of a verb, and the action noun can be any case. See ***

***To express a complex noun phrase such as "the murder of the king by the thief" you may simply use the following structures: "the murder(ANY) king(ACC) thief(GEN)." A noun in the Accusative generally follows a verb or other case taking item, with the Dative following next, and the Genetive following last. Prepositional case takes precedence when present, and Genetive takes precedence when speaking of direct possession of or relation to a noun (unlike the example).

~Grammar Illustrations~

He killed the king!
--he.NOM kill.PAST the king.ACCDO
Have you heard of the sword?
LIT. Did you hear about the sword?
--do.MOD.PAST hear.INF you.NOM about the sword.PRP?
The thief's execution will be tomorrow.
--the execution.NOM thief.GEN will.MOD.PRES be.INF tomorrow(ADV).
--tomorrow.NOM will.MOD.PRES be.INF the execution.NOM theif.GEN.
The murder of the king happened on Tuesday.
LIT. The killing of the king happened on Tuesday.
--the murder.NOM king.ACC happen.PAST on(PRP) Tuesday.PRP.

With that out of the way, I need to know...

arrow For the Inclusive case... I know I want this case, so that all nouns are declined in some way. Is this a good idea or even practical? The other purpose for this case is so that nouns are clear within compound nouns. I'm also going to include a special "and" conjunction that only includes the item before and after, so that you can say something like "I'll listen to rock and roll and metal," but knowing that "rock and roll" are one chunk, and metal is a separate chunk... This will employ the Inclusive case.

NOTE that I named this case myself, so Inclusive might not be the best name. Any better ideas?

arrow You can use the Accusative and Genitive to mark the patient/experiencer of an action noun and the agent of an action noun respectively. An action noun in this context is a verb expressed as a noun indication an action (is this obvious?). I think this is a good idea, especially within the Viking context in which who-doing-what-to-whom is often important. Also, would either of these count as passive voice?

arrow Prepositional case... I love this one, especially after having to bother with Dative/Accusative/Genitive/Two-Way prepositions in German. Before I go making all the prepositions, I need to know if this might cause me any serious problems? I know in English, we just use the plain noun or Object Form of a pronoun to indicate the object of a preposition, so I figure this will work much the same way. Comments.... Suggestions?

arrow One last thing, the Vocative case. It serves the sole purpose of marking a proper noun, pronoun, or other noun which the speaker is using to address someone or something (present or otherwise). Should I even bother with this? I added this in to keep up the "all nouns decline for gramm. case," but I could just drop it and make it a different case or something. Personally, I think it's useful, but only marginally. Of course, Vikings would probably spend a lot of time calling out people or making dramatic boasts to gods or mythical beasts, so it may be more useful that I originally intended. What do you guys think?

...

That's about it for the questions. Well? I'd really appreciate any comments!

Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 6:23 am

I think the Prepositional case sounds the best to me. surprised

Maybe you could do a joint prepositional/genitive?

Eccentric Iconoclast
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Xeigrich
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Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 2:00 pm

Eccentric Iconoclast

I think the Prepositional case sounds the best to me. surprised

Maybe you could do a joint prepositional/genitive?

Well, I've got the the Genitive covering Possessive and plain Genitive, and also marking the agent of an action noun. There shouldn't be any prepositions involved here, unless the action noun takes a preposition (thus putting the action noun in Prepositional case, but not making any difference to the Genitive cased agent after it).

The Prepositional case only occurs when a noun is the object of an actual preposition word. I don't like having accusative/dative/genitive prepositions, so there's only the single Prepositional case for use with all prepositions.

Hmm.

What about the Inclusive case? I can't think of any better way to do what it does... Honestly, I threw in the part about using inclusive case when forming compound nouns just so that the Inclusive case wouldn't seem completely useless beyond making sure all nouns are in some case. I also decided not to use Nominative for random nouns throughout the sentence, because Nominative is reserved for the Subject only, and in copula sentences.

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 7:21 pm

I would think go with three cases- Nominative, genative, and then lump acusative and dative together into one.

lili of the lamplight

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Eccentric Iconoclast
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Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 8:54 pm

lili of the lamplight

I would think go with three cases- Nominative, genative, and then lump acusative and dative together into one.

I always find that it works better when you put dative and genitive together.

Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 12:02 am

Eccentric Iconoclast

lili of the lamplight

I would think go with three cases- Nominative, genative, and then lump acusative and dative together into one.

I always find that it works better when you put dative and genitive together.

Really? The way I have it, Genitive basically indicates "of the __," Accusative indicates "for the __" and Dative indicates "to the __." I wouldn't want to mix Dative and Accusative because there is a considerable emphasis on which direction actions are going in this conlang. Even if I left it up to word order, there would still be ambiguity in many situations. I also wanted to leave out several prepositions in order to give this language an older feel (real Old Norse has relatively few prepositions, each with several possible modern English equivalents). I'm not sure about combining Dative and Genitive... I might try it out and see if it works satisfactorily.

I know I want to have Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, and Prepositional. These five cases are very effective and efficient at what they do and how I intend them to be used. It's really the Inclusive and Vocative that I'm unsure about. I'm keeping them until I decide they're not worth keeping, though. A quick note about Inclusive, though... Normally, you would use Nominative for both sides of a sentence when a copula is used (example: "The son is the king" both son and king would be nominative). In this conlang, though, Inclusive is used for the less important element (king) to emphasize the real subject.

Also, I can't decide whether to weight the declension more on articles or more on the actual words. It's easier to use articles, but then you'd have to always use the article or case becomes unstable. I've tried declining the words themselves, in true ancient Germanic style, but it gets cumbersome with 7 cases and 3 genders.

Oh, oh... Maybe Accusative and Dative nouns should have the same ending, but have different article declensions...

Xeigrich
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Eccentric Iconoclast
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Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 5:41 pm

Look at Romanian.

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