Re: Conlang Development With Multple Noun Cases

Arek Bellagio wrote:
> This, in my opinion, leads to a more 'natural appearing' language. Unlike
> Esperanto, where all the nouns (that I know of?) end in o, Maraso only
> requires an attached prefix for nominative when the noun is plural, as said
> above. All nouns require the other case suffixes.
Many natlangs have a nominative singular ending that is required
always.  Latin, for instance, in 2nd declinsion had -us (historically, a
stem ending in -o followed by the ending -s), you couldn't drop the
-us.  Some nouns, on the other hand, such as _sol_ had no nominative
singular ending.  I think that there are some natlangs where all nouns
require a nominative singular ending.  Also, in Esperanto, the -o can be
elided.

> Which leads me to my next question: those of you who have developed conlangs
> with multiple cases, how do you further development of your language? How do
> you create adjectives? Usually, nouns with cases do not require a specific
> word order, right?
Depends.  Some languages with cases have free word order, while others
have restricted word order.  I think that those with restricted order
are usually in the first stages of loosing the cases, tho.  Because the
cases are redundant, they can be lost with impunity.

> Well, do you also decline adjectives? For example, I was
> thinking of having adjectives end in on, an, en, and in. So far, I'm stuck
> on whether or not I should decline adjectives to number as well as case. How
> have you others done this in the past? I'm eager to see how you've tackled this.
In some languages, such as most of the IE langs, adjectives agree with
nouns, they are declined like nouns.  I don't know of any langs where
adjectives agree in case but not number, so if you're going to have them
agree with the noun in case, they should agree in number.