Re: how many cases is too many?

Staving Reilly Schlaier:
>one of my older conlangs has: Nom., Accu., Dative, Benefactive,
>Genitive, Posessive, Ablative, Allative, Vocative and Insrumental.
>how many in you personal opinions is too many?
>most of the time i prefer to keep it down to Nom./Accu., Dative,
>Posessive and Instrumental.

I believe that Finnish has seventeen cases, so ten is certainly not
excessive. My main conlang, Khangaþyagon, is an agglutinating language, in
which nouns can be modified by fairly long strings of affixes - each noun
can potentially have several thousand grammatical forms. See
http://www.artlangs.com/index.php?module=v4bJournal&func=journal_view&uid=88
for more details. Of course, in a noun system this complex, I don't think
that "case" is really an applicable term

Pete