Zompist Bboard Again

The below table represents the declension of vowel-final nouns in a WIP conlang (my first, really). I'm looking for advice on how best to organize--to the extent possible--these into "classes." They are organized by proto-vowel endings. An accent mark indicates stress in an unexpected location.

As of right now, from what I can tell, words pattern together differently depending on whether they are singular, animate plural or inanimate plural. It looks like there may be room for some analogy in the -*u GEN.AN.PL to match the -*o declension and the -*a ACC.SNG to match the *-e and -*o patterns. Open to any ideas or other comments/questions.

Declension "classes" is kind of a concept specific to Indo-European languages and it's mostly becuase of a distinction between "athematic" roots which ended in a consonant and "thematic" roots which involve some vowel like /u/ or /i/ in the case endings.

So like, you'd have one declension class for the athematic roots, which usually manifest as either no vowel plus case endings or /a/ plus case endings (e.g. Latin -as/-s, Old persian -a, -am, -ā), another declension class for roots ending in /i/ plus case endings (e.g. Latin -is, Old Persian -iš, iy), another for roots ending in /u/ plus case endings (e.g. Latin -us, Old Persian -uš, -uv).

So for your language, you could have one declension class that involves Proto -a, another that involves Proto -e. -i, and a third involving Proto -o, -u. Because for each of these categories, the case endings appear similar, especially in the nominative and accusative.

Going along with what Ahzoh said, do you want to make your language IE-esque, because this kind of system is very IE-esque as a whole? If sure, fine, but then you should think about how else you would want to make your language IE-like. But you should be aware that this is not the only way languages work; e.g. many languages have case-marking in the form of clitics that attach to entire NP's at a time and which only form anything resembling "declensions" due to phonological effects of the clitics attaching to the (usually) final word in the NP.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 5:01 pm [...] many languages have case-marking in the form of clitics that attach to entire NP's at a time and which only form anything resembling "declensions" due to phonological effects of the clitics attaching to the (usually) final word in the NP.

This is actually closer to what I was ultimately trying to do. Maybe a little cliche, but was looking at Basque as inspiration . Some of the sound changes I set up currently, though, have collapsed the more "agglutinative" proto-language.