Hey Danny,
While your post is quite informative, it contains a few errors as regards
your Russian examples (the other stuff seems OK to me ;-))
> | Simply put, what is the difference between noun class
> | and noun case?
>
> In terms of Indo-European and Semitic, noun class is gender. Inanimate
objects
> that have no natural sex may be of various genders, seemingly arbitrarily
> assigned (but I kinda have a theory about that). I'll use Russian as an
example:
>
> gorod "city" = masculine because of consonant ending (plural: gorody)
The plural is gorodá (so stressed)
> strana "country" = feminine because of -a suffix (plural: strany)
> mesto "thing" = neuter because of -o suffix (plural: mesta)
Also, gender is of limited connection to the endings. There is a plethora
of -a masc. words, as well as consonant fem. words and more.
> Nominative: gorod "the city" (plural gorody)
pl. gorodá
> Accusative: gorod (same as Nominative because it's inanimate; if animate
it's
> same as Genitive)
Valid for masc. 2 declension nouns in the singular and all nouns in the
plural
> Genitive: gorody "of the city" (plural gorodov)
Gen. sg. góroda
> Dative: gorodu "to the city" (plural gorodam)
> Instrumental: gorodom "with/by way of the city" (plural gorodami)
> Prepositional: na gorode "in the city" (plural gorodakh)
> Note that the concept of case is a little different in agglutinating
languages
> like Finnish, Hungarian or Turkish, where there are more cases, but there
is a
> very regular, predictable system of suffixation (and Turkish incorporates
the
> plural marker -lar-/-ler- before the case endings which are the same for
both
> numbers). Sanskrit, Latin and Lithuanian, three outstanding cases in
> Indo-European, have a limited number of inflectional cases (and use
prepositions
> for others): eight, six and seven respectively. But masculine singulars
have one
> set of case endings, feminines another, neuters yet another, the plurals
get
> their own set, and then you have the lesser declensions, often based on
the end
> vowel of the noun stem and not the gender of the noun (Latin has -is, -us
> and -es nouns, for example). I haven't even mentioned irregularities and
> semi-irregularities (like Latin nouns ending in -x).
Old Church Slavonic and actually Old Russian also fall into this category,
since their inflexion is even more complicated than that of Mod. Russian.
--Pavel
P. S. I am reading a book on the history of Russian literary language, and
it employs an awful lot of examples with words considered, ahem, indecent in
Mod. Russian. I was nearly suffocated finding such an indecent word with an
explanation of how in OCS it should have been.... with another quite an
indecent word ;-)