Grammatical Case Puns

In my language Aoaxrai (WIP), I've put a system of noun cases and three of these cases I chose are the Aversive, the Evitative and the Pegative case:

The aversive is the case that indicates an avoidable object by disgust. It's marked by adding -sia/-šia:

tšixna-house

tšixnašia-"nasty" house

The evitative is the case that indicates an avoidable object because it could be dangerous. We add -voma:

tšixnavoma-"dangerous" house

And the Pegative indicates a giver. An agent who does the action of giving.

aoval-the (giver) man

However, the last one is a hypothetical grammatical case that maybe only appears in the Tlapanec language. In general, it doesn't exist in any natural language.

My conlang's still in working, but I wish to maintain these cases (at least the pegative).

What about your conlang, have you added some hypothetical cases, the pegative case or even a case that you have invented?

This is my current understanding [edit: confirmed by Antoine!] of the different cases in the Isu language and their endings (as well as rough explanations):

nominative (subject): stem

animate nominative (subject if it's a person): -s

genitive (owner of something): -às

dative (indirect object or destination): -àæ

definite (concrete?) accusative (direct object if it's an actual object): -ch

indefinite (abstract?) accusative (direct object if it's a concept): -á

animate accusative (direct object if it's a person): -m

locative (place): -æ

ablative (origin): -os

causal (reason for something): -ôd

instrumental (what you use to do something): -h

Ahoj všichni!

The most important grammatical issue in the Czech language are cases😉 In this video I provide the overview of them all and how to use them.😲 Take advantage of this lesson to expand your grammar!😀

Here is the link to the video! https://youtu.be/5vibfVQJroo Fajn den!

PS: I also created free declension charts you can use to learn the case endings. Download it here: https://autentickacestina.cz/index.php/go/declension/

Petr | AutentickaCestina

Dzień dobry! Are you looking for extra exercises to master the Polish cases? Subscribe to our platform and download the e-book "Przez Przypadek. Short stories to practise Polish cases': https://go-polish.co.uk/short-stories-practise-polish-cases/

The e-book contains 25 stories to practise the Polish case system. Each exercise focuses on two or three specific cases to let you slowly become familiar with the forms as well as the usage. The last four stories include mix of cases for you to test your knowledge. The stories cover popular topics and can also be a great help to revise and learn new vocabulary.

Pozdrawiam!

Just a heads up, I'm not familiar with all the language lingo and all the nooks and crannies, so if you have questions, I'll try my best to answer them.

I wanted to give a very basic and general explanation to how grammatical cases in my constructed language work work. First of all, we need to talk about sentence structure, because it is important. Chathenic's sentence structure is typically a simple subject-verb-object formula. Here's a typical sentence.

Sentence: Κϱίѱοⱷεϱ εɣꞇαͷꞇεѱ ɳαƺαͷια.

Phonetic: krɝstofɛr ɛːtantɛst lɑzɑɲɑ

Literal Translation: Christopher hates lasagna.

When a sentence is this type of formula, nouns do not need cases. However, Chathenic is a language with very flexible sentence structures. "Christopher hates lasagna" can also be written as "Lasagna Christopher hates." In this language you can change the structure of a normal sentence because the later in a sentence something is, the more you are trying to emphasize it. When you say "Christopher hates lasagna," you emphasize that lasagna is what he hates. "Lasagna Christopher hates" emphasizes that in this interaction, CHRISTOPHER hates it. Without cases, this structure would look like this.

Sentence: Ԉαƺαͷια Κϱίѱοⱷεϱ εɣꞇαͷꞇεѱ.

Literal Translation: Lasagna Christopher hates.

There's just one problem with this sentence without cases. There's another structure and it is translated to "Lasagna he hates" You can remove Christopher from the sentence to emphasize the HATRED more than anything. But if we do this, we get:

Sentence: Ԉαƺαͷια εɣꞇαͷꞇεѱ.

Literal Translation: This could either be interpreted as "Lasagna he hates" or "Lasagna hates"

Therefore, we must add a accusative case ending to the lasagna to clarify that lasagna is what is being hated. So we must add όϱ or ϱό (depending on the noun's ending) to whatever the object is in this structure to define it. The subject does not get affected, though. One thing to keep in mind is that even if you write "Lasagna Christopher hates," you still have to add the case.

Ԉαƺαͷια --> Ԉαƺαͷιαϱό

Sentence: Ԉαƺαͷιαϱό εɣꞇαͷꞇεѱ.

Phonetic: lɑzɑɲɑrʌ ɛːtantɛst

Literal Translation: Lasagna he hates.

and...

Sentence: Ԉαƺαͷιαϱό Κϱίѱοⱷεϱ εɣꞇαͷꞇεѱ.

Phonetic: lɑzɑɲɑrʌ krɝstofɛr ɛːtantɛst

Literal Translation: Lasagna Christopher hates.

This is the most common use of grammatical cases in this language, but the general idea is that most types of cases are used to define nouns when the typical sentence structure i

My conlang Tsałākuin has 6 noun classes: Abstract, Manmade, Natural, Terrestrial, Aquatic, and Exalted. Each class has augmentatives and diminutives specific to them (the diminutive for Exalted nouns comes from "baby," the one for Natural nouns comes from "pebble," etc.).

Is it possible that the same could be done with grammatical case?

For example, the dative case is derrived from an old word meaning "to give." (My case suffixes came from postpositions, which came from verbs). What if, for Terrestrial nouns, which includes animals, it comes from a word meaning "to feed?"

So the idea is: A sentence like "I send the king a robe" might be derrived from something like "I send a robe to give to the king." And a sentence like "I send the lion a steak" might be derrived from "I send a steak to feed the lion." So you'd have case suffixes derrived from different roots depending on the class.

Would something like that be naturalistic?

I don't write much in English, so I hope it's understandable.

So, I've been learning German for roughly a week and a half now, and for the life of me, I can't seem to grasp the grammatical cases. To be more precisely: I understand the concept behind them, that accusative determines the direct object, that they make inversion of words possible and so on, but after some days of only studying these cases, I still have a (really) hard time remembering the appropriate der/ein words, and I often mix them up (or I just straight up forget which one to use). Moreover, if I see a random phrase that contains some of the vocabulary I know, I can get the gist of it, but my mind starts wandering which Grammatical cases were used in it, where, and more importantly, why, and in no time I am utterly confused again. This has been extremely frustrating, since I know they're very important to understand German as a whole, and to be honest, right now, I am pretty much hopeless, but I'm willingly to try whatever helped you guys to internalize them.

Context: I've been learning German with Duolingo, and for the past 4 or 5 days, I've been doing some grammar exercises on a book

I was scrolling through the Wikipedia page for grammatical cases and I don't really see the difference, is it just about the point of view ? or maybe about the truthiness of the statement ?

First off: I'm a professional software engineer but complete noob regarding NLP and linguistics, so please excuse if I explain myself badly or misuse any terms.

Is there a tool, or even just a research effort, to enable a search-and-replace mechanism for single root words that results in gramatically correct results for (a) language(s) with grammatical cases? Or, to narrow it down and maybe make more clear what I mean: Is there a tool that can, in a German text replace all occurences of one noun with another noun in such a way that the grammatical case is still correct everywhere?

For example, let's say I have this text:

"Ich machte die Spende nur der Spende wegen."

Then I replace all occurences of "Spende" (or rather its root) with "Beitrag" and would like to get as output

"Ich machte den Beitrag nur des Beitrags wegen."

For non-German speakers: The result is different from a normal search an replace because the genitive case of "Beitrag" is constructed differently than that of "Spende".

Further questions:

• Are there any specific or technical terms I should use to research this?
• How hard of a problem is this? Is it something an NLP newbie like me could take on as a side project? (I imagine it being easy, as it's syntax-only and doesn't require semantic understanding of the text.)

Hallo zusammen!
So, we have two sentences here:

1. Ich liebe meinen Freund
2. Ich vertraue meinem Freund

Why does "meinen" change to "meinem" here. I can understand that in the first sentence, we have the accusative form, and in the second case, we have the dative form. The question is, what's the difference? Why does the case has to change here? Why aren't they both accusative? Thank you in advance

So I noticed that Latin, which has a pretty substantial declension system, also conjugates verbs based on who is doing the action (I run, you run, he/she runs, etc.) In Latin that results in six different verb endings for each tense/aspect for each declension, which to me seems... excessive.

For example, it seems to me that there's a lot of redundancy in the following three-(pseudo)word sentence:

> [You (dative/indirect object)] [I (nominative/subject)] [Verb "I talk" (present tense)]

In other words, "I talk to you". The thing that confuses me is that you could simplify the conjugation without losing any information:

> [You (dative/indirect object)] [I (nominative/subject) [Verb "talk" (present tense)]

It's still "I talk to you". You know that I'm the one doing the talking because "I" is the subject and "you" is the object. I could even rearrange the order of the words and that would still be clear. If Latin speakers conjugated this way, the number of verb endings would have been divided by six, which would potentially simplify the language by a lot.

 

Now I'm working on a conlang that uses five grammatical cases, and I'm wondering: do I really need to use all those conjugations like you would in a Romance language? Do all languages that use case do it that way? Is it naturalistic to only conjugate for tense and aspect if the subjects and objects of the sentence are clearly defined by the declensions?

Thoughts in general on complexity/simplicity vs. explicitness/implicitness?

As for the first question, the best I could find was that Bavarian removed a lot of inflictions but still retains many. For the second, all I found was something about German aristocrats knowing Latin?

I was thinking of making a conlang based on German. German has an odd case-marking system where case is normally marked on the determiner, or if there is none, the adjective. A consequence of this system is that proper nouns virtually never take case marking. Of course, nouns do technically still have a genitive, though its been declining in use for years.

I dislike just copying German's four cases, however, I have a hard time justifying having more. Either they would be too rarely used, or they would predominantly be used with proper nouns. An example of the latter would be locational cases (locative, ablative, lative, etc...), along with cases like the comitative which are used solely with nouns referring to people in some way.

Note that German is the only natlang I know that makes extensive use of cases, so I'm only really used to that system. I would like to monkey the system up a bit, just so I don't make something that looks like a word-for-word cipher of German, but with my limited experience I can't imagine how one would use anything beyond the vanilla nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. I know Russian and Latin have more, but of course they don't have articles, and case IS marked on all nouns be they proper or common.

What other grammatical cases could be justified with such an odd lop-sided system?

Most IE languages lost case markings, Turkic langs on the other hand have preserved case markings from Proto Turkic with no issue and Uralic languages have (a lot of them) actually expanded the case system despite extreme phonological changes (Hungarian).

Why is that?

Do you think in case of Baltic langusges proximity to Finnic languages might have helped preserve the inflectionsl morphology?

(INTRO - You may skip this)

When I first started conlanging, I had a very Indo-European way of thinking of how cases work. Eventually, I started doing research on non-Indo-European languages and things started becoming different (e.g. Ergative-Absolutive alignment, adpositional cases, animacy, etc.). That being said, I am fascinated by how different languages (especially conlangs) make use of grammatical case, whether it's similar to German with it's 4 noun cases, Hungarian with 18, Mandarin Chinese with no case, Pitjantjatjara (Australia) with split-ergative case marking, and Tlingit (Alaska) where cases seem to be in some sort of Schrödinger cat situation of being grammatical cases, suffixes and postpositions all at the same time and not depending on the situation (it's complicated).

(THE QUESTION)

So my question is this. How many Grammatical Cases does your language have? In my language, Kalavi (given its location within the Europe-Siberia sprachbund) has 10 cases. Hylsian, a WIP language in Central Africa has 6 cases, and another language, Syt (Indian Ocean), has no cases (it relies on word order for marking). Few-sentence replies or walls of text are all welcomed. XD

Here are a couple of bonus/optional questions I'm putting just for fun:

• Does your language treat adpositions as part of your grammatical case system/paradigm?
• How does your language encode cases in your polysynthetic/fusional/agglutinative/analytical language?
• Does your language use TOPIC-FOCUS casing/marking?
• Do adjectives/pronouns/demonstratives/numerals/adverbs decline for case?
• Is animacy and/or volition involved?
• Do your cases change base on gender/noun class/honorifics?
• Can you stack cases?
• Does your language exhibit asymmetrical case marking (e.g. English accusative and dative assuming the oblique case)?

Looking forward to hearing from all of you!

If someone prefers “he” when the subject of a sentence, don’t they inherently prefer “him” when the object?

In other words, excluding instances where people say “he/they” to mean either/or, couldn’t we all just say “he” pronouns, “she” pronouns, and “they” pronouns, respectively? Or are there people who actually want one gender for nominative case and another objective case?

Hi,

I have a question regarding something I have in my conlang for many years now but don't really know how to classify. My conlang (called Hilltongue in English) is a Germlang with a lot of features not really common among Germanic languages (just for context). The phenomenon I would like to ask anybody here how to classify is this:

There is a set of prepositions which are not dissimilar to those of other Germanic languages, for the examples of this question I'll show you the following ones:

• arā (down towards the speaker) - demands the Accusative Case, cognate with German herab
  Examples:
  dn bhírcha' n-arā, dn hüilä' n-arā
  /dən ˈwɾ̩xɑ nɑˌrɑː , dən ˈɦyːle nɑ̩rɑː/
  down the mountain, down the hill
  the-Acc mountain-Acc down, the-Acc hill-Acc down

• chínā (down away from the speaker) - also demands the Accusative Case, cognate with German hinab
  Examples:
  dn mbhírcha' chínā, dn hüilä chínā
  /dən ˈwɾ̩xɑ çnɑː , dən ˈɦyːle çnɑː/
  down the mountain, down the hill
  the-Acc mountain-Acc down, the-Acc hill-Acc down

• nàch (to, used as "to a place with its own name" has also the meaning "after") - demands the Dative Case, cognate with German nach
  Examples (I'll break the usage rule a bit by not using toponyms but remaining with the words mountain and hill):
  dam mbhírch nàch, dam hüil nàch
  /dɐm ˈwɾ̩x nɒx , dɐm ˈɦyːl nɒx/
  to the mountain, to the hill
  the-Acc mountain-Acc towards, the-Acc hill-Acc towards

Now these are three examples which might seem rather without problems. However some one hundred to two hundred years ago the speakers of the Hilltongue began to use these (and other) prepositions as suffixes very much like the German forms bergab, bergauf, during which the final consonants of the Noun and the first consonant of the suffix effect each other in various ways:

• *barg- + arā = bahrā, hüil + arā = hüirlā
• *barg- + anā = barngā, hüil + anā = hüilnā
• *barg- + nàch = barach, hüil + nàch = hüilach

These new forms were initially used with the respective article in the Dat/Acc case, for example: dam mbarg-àch --- dam mbarach

However, with time the marking with the article was abandoned (the default being that these are indefinite and definite forms must be marked by the article) and while most of these "suffixoids" retain the same meaning, some have changed their meaning slightly - -(n)àch is now used as an ending indicating "positioned on/at" (practica

You often hear about languages losing grammatical cases (e.g. English), and there are examples of languages forming tones (Old Chinese, Punjabi), but are there any examples of languages forming grammatical cases from nothing?

I am not sure about the use of 'self' in this particular sentence, from The Life of Saint Swithun:

> se bisċop hēt þæt hē fare tō Āþelwolde bisċope, and seċġe þæt hē ġeopenie him self mīne byrġene

The meaning is clear:

> The bishop ordered (him) to travel to bishob Athelwold, and tell him to open himself my grave.

Now, I know that 'self' sometimes takes the strong, sometimes takes the weak declension of adjectives; however, since 'hē' here is in the dative case, shouldn't it be 'selfan/selfum'?

Also, if anyone knows, is this a common Old English construction? To follow a pronoun with the dative and 'self' to mean 'in person'?

How do you perceive caseless languages (like English, Spanish, Chinese...)? Do you feel like it's weird that everything is in the "nominative" case? Does it feel "more primitive" to you in terms of perception (there's obviously nothing like a "primitive" language, but it could be perceived that way I guess)?

I'm not denigrating case-less languages, plus I speak 4 of them, I'm just genuinely curious!

PIE was already inevitably heading in that direction with its notoriously unorganized case system. In addition, its case endings could have been more distinctive, with most of them ending in a vowel, s, or m, which cause a merge in pronunciation in a lot of them.

Hello! I got stumbled upon with Anne Frank's quotes, and as a German learner myself, I was able to notice a lot of similarities between these two languages. Does the Dutch language have grammatical cases (Nominativ, Akkusativ, usw) or grammatical gender (der/die/das/die)? Thanks :)

I recently started learning German but I have really been struggling with grammatical cases. To all language learner's out there, how did you overcome this? Is there any way you found easiest to learn them?

Hello! I have recently purchased the Pro version. I created a language with 15 grammatical cases, including the Vocative, Distributive, Essive and Translative. My explanation (can be wrong, though) is:

• Distributive case is used for nouns for the meanings of per or each: eat one cookie each day.
• Vocative case which is used for nouns to identify that this noun is being addressed (like 'O brother' of 'dear friend'): John! we're eating without you.
• Essive case denotes a form as a temporary location, state of being, or character in which the subject was at a given time (like 'as a _ '): when I was a child / As a kid, I played a lot.
• Translative case indicates a change in the state of a noun, either permanent or temporarily, with the general sense of "becoming X " or "change to X " (like 'turn into'): they turned angry!

Anyways, I want to disable these cases for pronouns. You can't say 'per me' or 'when I was him', or 'she turned into they', or even 'Hey it!'. But, I do not know how to do it in the grammar section. I tried to do this:

This is what I did - stupid, I know.

And this is the result:

This is in the dictionary.

And this is in the chart.

Please help.

Edit: Forgot to say, the cases I want to disable for 2nd Singular, Dual, Trial (forms of plural, consisting of 2 and 3 ppl) and Plural (cases that can be used with the 'Vocative' case), are randomly created (like the two next to 'av ya'), which is worse than Ø.

Ahoj všichni!

The most important grammatical issue in the Czech language are cases😉 In this video I provide the overview of them all and how to use them.😲 Take advantage of this lesson to expand your grammar!😀

Here is the link to the video! https://youtu.be/5vibfVQJroo Fajn den!

PS: I also created free declension charts you can use to learn the case endings. Download it here: https://autentickacestina.cz/index.php/go/declension/

Petr | AutentickaCestina