How many cases is too many?

[Zju]

Late to the party, but IIRC Tsez has over one hundred cases. So 21 cases are by a big margin not too many. If you're in the mood for it, you can break with the European-esque tradition of reducing number of cases (during recorded history, that is) and have the colloquial register have quite a bit more cases than the literary register. This can serve as inspiration.

[bradrn]

Upon re-reading your post, I see that I managed to misread ‘case-marker’ for ‘affix’, somehow… I thought you were setting case-markers and adpositions up as a binary opposition, as was the case for that Hungarian paper I mentioned.)

Is it this one? Afraid system won't let me attach a pdf.

http://repository.essex.ac.uk/399/1/Comrie-Fest.pdf

Yes, this looks familiar.

[WeepingElf]

Late to the party, but IIRC Tsez has over one hundred cases. So 21 cases are by a big margin not too many. If you're in the mood for it, you can break with the European-esque tradition of reducing number of cases (during recorded history, that is) and have the colloquial register have quite a bit more cases than the literary register. This can serve as inspiration.

Ah, the famous Northeast Caucasian "case construction kits". Tsez is not alone; many languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian family have such paradigms. As can be clearly seen from the page you link to, these "cases" are compounds built from a modest inventory of suffixes. Similar but smaller "case construction kits" exist in some other languages such as Burushaski; Finnish and Hungarian are further examples, though their "kits" are much smaller (2x3 forms in Finnish, 3x3 forms in Hungarian) and the forms have been blurred somewhat by later developments. (I am planning to have a "case construction kit" of this kind in a language descending from Old Albic, BTW.)

Indeed, many scholars hesitate to call such compound forms "cases" (see also the paper evmdbm linked to); they clearly are not the same kind of cases as, for instance, the ergative or the genitive are - and a language that has a unique, unanalyzable suffix for each of these "cases" would be unnatural and kitchen-sinky.

[FlamyobatRudki]

So reading this thread did I understand correctly: kitchen sinkey is what ever doesn't accurately reflect your prejudices of what a natlang would be like?
[even if or possibly especially if such an assesement is not actually based on a solid basis of data]

[Travis B.]

So reading this thread did I understand correctly: kitchen sinkey is what ever doesn't accurately reflect your prejudices of what a natlang would be like?
[even if or possibly especially if such an assesement is not actually based on a solid basis of data]

Kitchen-sinky is opening up Wikipedia and using just about every category listed and creating a separate affix for it without rhyme or reason without taking into account how natlangs operate. Note that creating a con-Finnish, a con-Hungarian, or even a con-Tsez need not be creating a kitchen sink as long as it operates like natlangs with real large case systems - but simply taking an arbitrary, large subset of the cases listed in Wikipedia and making arbitrary affixes for each of them without any order to them likely is.

[hwhatting]

2. In the colloquial register the translative and the excessive will probably fall out of use and their functions be taken up by the illative and elative, respectively. The translative and exessive will remain the literary register.

3. Likewise, the instrumental, comitative, and the abessive will fall out of use in the colloquial register. The instrumental will be lost and its function will move to the adessive. The comitative and abessive will be taken over by prepositions.

4. The vocative will erode away in the colloquial language and become identical to the nominative.

5. The prolative will be replaced by a preposition in the colloquial language.

Other than their basic functions one would expect from each case, I have not yet decided what else certain cases would be used for - however I do think I'll be using the partitive with numerals. Where the colloquial language has lost cases to prepositions I think one of the Grammatical cases (probably the genitive) will also become used as a prepositional case.

Zju's comment reminded me that I had thought of commenting on this. Your language seems to have a a tendency to reduce the case systems in the colloquial language. That doesn't have to be like this - there is such a tendency in many Western European languages, but the reason for this is that in that area, there is a long-term trend towards the reduction of case systems, and the fact that literary registers often show more case distinctions than colloquial registers mostly reflects that the literary register was established in the past and often consciously based on more archaic stages, while the colloquial registers represent the further development of the trend towards case reduction.
OTOH, in languages where there is no such long-term trend, the colloquial language may just have a different case system or even more cases than the literary language; one example is Russian, which has lost the common Slavic (going back to PIE) vocative (except for three petrified items), but where the colloquial language has innovated a new vocative for a specific, frequently used class of appellatives.

[Jonlang]

2. In the colloquial register the translative and the excessive will probably fall out of use and their functions be taken up by the illative and elative, respectively. The translative and exessive will remain the literary register.

3. Likewise, the instrumental, comitative, and the abessive will fall out of use in the colloquial register. The instrumental will be lost and its function will move to the adessive. The comitative and abessive will be taken over by prepositions.

4. The vocative will erode away in the colloquial language and become identical to the nominative.

5. The prolative will be replaced by a preposition in the colloquial language.

Other than their basic functions one would expect from each case, I have not yet decided what else certain cases would be used for - however I do think I'll be using the partitive with numerals. Where the colloquial language has lost cases to prepositions I think one of the Grammatical cases (probably the genitive) will also become used as a prepositional case.

Zju's comment reminded me that I had thought of commenting on this. Your language seems to have a a tendency to reduce the case systems in the colloquial language. That doesn't have to be like this - there is such a tendency in many Western European languages, but the reason for this is that in that area, there is a long-term trend towards the reduction of case systems, and the fact that literary registers often show more case distinctions than colloquial registers mostly reflects that the literary register was established in the past and often consciously based on more archaic stages, while the colloquial registers represent the further development of the trend towards case reduction.

This is what I'm going for. The idea is that a very high volume of literature be created during the Middle-L and Early Late-L period, which is the reason for the two registers. Loss of cases seems to me like an obvious and simple way to do this (as well as other things like archaic verb conjugations, archaic plural marking, etc). My entire world-building project is based on European history and mythology, so the conlangs reflecting European languages is deliberate.