Zompist Bboard Again

Preamble
I've been struggling with coming up with a good case system for my nouns for a few years now. I'm just not good at coming up with morphemes. I'll often make a lot of headway into pushing through this problem but then some other aspect of the language gets in my way.

A lot of the trouble I have is that I'm just never sufficiently imaginative with sound changes. I know enough to make some interesting quirks, but not enough to create an language family (or family of dialects) or PIE-level deep morphological history. I really wish I could organically generate a case system from scratch but it's just beyond my current knowledge and capabilities, so I just stick to generating ex nihilo and working backwards really shallowly. Then the other issue is i'll get paranoid that my morphemes are too random to mesh well or too patterning (e.g. avoiding certain vowels or consonants in affixes because they're used by other affixes) or transparent.

Anyways, I've been looking at a variety of languages for inspiration for the aesthetic I'm looking for ("ancient sophisticated language spoken by desert-dwelling people of a vast empire"), namely Old Persian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, and Kassite.

Lately I've felt a sudden burst of inspiration and I have been coming up with a noun system I'm rather satisfied with. However, there are still grammatical categories/affixes that I'm having troubles coming up with that fit elegantly with what I have while also aligning with my goals, so I am asking for help/consultation with my noun system to really make it satisfying.

TL; DR I need help/people to bounce ideas off of because my own mind is working against me

What I have
So my current iteration of Vrkhazhian makes a major distinction between syntactic (or adverbal) cases and attributive (or adnominal) cases. Nouns declined in syntactic cases do not modify other nouns and they relate to the verb. Nouns in attributive cases modify nouns or verbs and nouns modified by them must be placed in the construct state (e.g. aggar tālaḫ "gate-CONS city-GEN"). Vrkhazhians do not have adjectives and thus the only way to describe things or actions is with nouns in attributive cases or verbs taking a special form that indicates a relative clause (e.g. rābim maḫḫatti "a man who rules; a ruling man" vs rābim yāsas maḫdatti "a man rules the land"). Ideally syntactic cases should be older and more opaque (i.e. more irregular or syncretic) than attributive cases.

The Cases are as follows:
Syntactic Cases
Nominative (Subject of the verb)
Vocative (Direct adressee, considered a special form of the nominative)
Accusative (Primary object of the verb)
Instrumental (Secondary object of the verb)
Regarding the accusative and instrumental, Vrkhazhian is a secundative language)
Attributive Cases
Genitive (Expresses inalienable possession and composition)
Ablative (Expresses alienable possession and origin, I took this idea of using the ablative to express alienable possession from a sentence example of Kayardild about a raft)
Equalitive (Expresses likeness to another noun, e.g. like X, X-like, X-ly)
Ornative (Expresses the possession of a quality denoted by the noun, e.g. X-ful, X-having)
Privative (Expresses the lack of a quality denoted by a noun, e.g X-less)

Another thing is that Vrkhazhian has a mora-based syllable weight structure and this weight determines the stress that nouns receive. Light syllables are CV, heavy syllables are CVV or CVC, and heavy syllables are CVVC. Stress always falls on the heaviest non-final syllable, unless the final syllable is super heavy, in which case stress will fall on that syllable.
Relatedly, Vrkhazhian prefers alternating stress patterns/rhythms (that is, words are preferably either iambic or trochaic) and roots and morphemes will try to change to accommodate this, such as shortening or lengthening a vowel or consonant. An example of this is the word igras "gate" whose construct state form is aggar which resulted from an earlier form ágar (stress wanted to stay on the first syllable, so the medial consonant geminated to "support its weight"). Stress-based lengthening is also evident in nouns like kabbum "queen" (< kábum) and nārum 'mother" (< nárum).

I like what I have come up with regards to this, however, I sometimes feel like it limits me sometimes when coming up with morphemes or when dealing with superheavy syllables which I always feel to be highly unstable, especially next to light syllables or word-finally. Oh and the other limitation is that weak consonants like /j w h/ elide in almost all environments, resulting in a lot of vowel coalescence and lengthening of preceding syllables (a phenomenon I call "moraic preservation").

Table of Cases
FEM = feminine, MASC = masculine, NAN = neuter animate, NIN = neuter inanimate So, I basically ripped these suffixes off of Kassite, which I chose to initially interpret as either gender endings; -i = masc (janz-i "king"), -u = feminine (iaš-u "country), -ar = neuter animate (hašm-ar "falcon, simb-ar "child"), -aš = neuter inanimate (dak-aš "star"). And it would have no grammatical cases. That solves a lot of problems for me, except that SOV word order is not stable in languages without cases (a paper I remember reading explained that it is because of ambiguity in distinguishing subjects from objects without an intervening element, like a verb). It's also not as interesting.

Anyways, as you can see I'm still struggling to come up with endings for the genitive and ablative for masculine and feminine nouns, as well as the equative, ornative, and privative cases for all nouns (though I might make them prefixes). Sure, I could just do -i-ḫ and -u-ḫ and -i-r and -u-r like the neuter cases, but I'm already concerned that my case system is too formulaic and regular since most of my morphemes already just boil down to -vC and -v̄Ca. That's the other thing, I'm also too concerned about the stability of the singular/plural distinction since they're simply a distinction in length without any additional featural differences such as quality or tone. And I have most of the affixes ending in -a for the similar concern over stability in closed syllables.

Anyways, if you read this far I thank you and for any help you may offer.

This may not be super helpful but I'd say it could be fun (and more naturalistic) to introduce a bit of ambiguity. If you're feeling things are a bit too regular, try thinking about distinctions Vrkhazhian speakers could do without. As a random example, the genitive singular ending for feminine nouns could be identical to the instrumental plural ending for masculine nouns. Or certain cases could lack the singular/plural distinction altogether.

In Msérsca, I have an ablative and an abessive (pretty much the same as your privative) which do not distinguish number. So sían lenderá from his bed and ídean lenderá from their beds use the same form of the noun lende bed. Similarly, pactilam could mean either without a hat or without hats (making it best translated as number-indistinct hatless). I have other ambiguities in the declension paradigm as well: nominative plural and genitive singular are identical for many nouns (much as in Latin and spoken English), and some nouns' dative endings make it impossible to tell from that form alone which declension they fall under.

Here's an idea for your equative, ornative, and privative that you can feel free to throw out:

Case: Fem / Masc / N. An. / N In.
Equ Sg: -ūra / -īra / -āra / -āra (note that neuters are identical to your ablative plural)
Equ Pl: -āwara / -āyara / -āḫara / -āšara
Orn: -ušal / -išal / -ašal / -ašal (no number distinction)
Priv: -ubba / -ibba / -abba / -abba (no number distinction)

I personally must say that I tend to avoid conventional nominative/accusative systems, tending to favor either ergative, active-stative, or hierarchical alignments with direct-inverse systems, and I have done things like only making case of core arguments when it is "unusual" (e.g. only marking agentive case on inanimate agents or patientive case on animate patients).

That said, I have at times come up with elaborate Uralic-inspired case systems, but at other times thought better and came up with systems with a relatively limited number of non-core cases (e.g. locative, ablative, and allative) and combined them with relational nouns (very often derived from body parts) for more complex relations. Yet in many of my newer languages I do not resort to case at all (unless one can call the marking of core arguments with direct-inverse a sort of "case"), but rather make extremely liberal use of serial verb constructions and relative clauses (yes, I am a fan of "verby" adjectives, aka stative verbs).

Ahzoh wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 3:50 amSo, I basically ripped these suffixes off of Kassite, which I chose to initially interpret as either gender endings; -i = masc (janz-i "king"), -u = feminine (iaš-u "country), -ar = neuter animate (hašm-ar "falcon, simb-ar "child"), -aš = neuter inanimate (dak-aš "star"). And it would have no grammatical cases. That solves a lot of problems for me, except that SOV word order is not stable in languages without cases

Do you need it to be stable?

äreo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 10:51 am This may not be super helpful but I'd say it could be fun (and more naturalistic) to introduce a bit of ambiguity. If you're feeling things are a bit too regular, try thinking about distinctions Vrkhazhian speakers could do without. As a random example, the genitive singular ending for feminine nouns could be identical to the instrumental plural ending for masculine nouns. Or certain cases could lack the singular/plural distinction altogether.

I have considered syncretizing the instrumental and accusative in the plural, though I'm not sure which ending would prevail.

Here's an idea for your equative, ornative, and privative that you can feel free to throw out:

Case: Fem / Masc / N. An. / N In.
Equ Sg: -ūra / -īra / -āra / -āra (note that neuters are identical to your ablative plural)
Equ Pl: -āwara / -āyara / -āḫara / -āšara
Orn: -ušal / -išal / -ašal / -ašal (no number distinction)
Priv: -ubba / -ibba / -abba / -abba (no number distinction)

I had at the time of posting already determined that the morphemes would involve /l/ (equative), /s/ (ornative), and /m/ (privative) but I did not know how they'd manifest. Also ye, they prolly don't need a number distinction