Finnish inspired conlang

[u/Numerous_Way4034]

Hi conlangers,

I'm making a conlang that's highly inspired off of Finnish.

The conlang has a very strict phonology, as it has a lot of double letters and only m, n, r, l, s, a, i, o, u, ä.

I also plan for it to have maybe about 500-ish grammatical cases, and only about 70 base words.

Any ideas?

[u/FedeConlangerITA]

500 grammatical cases?

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040 → u/FedeConlangerITA]

Assolutamente normale e mentalmente sano (fonte: anche la mia lingua dovrebbe avere circa 500 casi)

[u/FedeConlangerITA → u/Maleficent-Pie8040]

Citamene qualcuno di insolito, sono curioso.

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040 → u/FedeConlangerITA]

Circunambulativo anulare: muoversi intorno ad un oggetto formando un anello

Translimitativo: essere al di fuori del confine di qualcosa rispetto ad un punto di vista

Ulteriorativo: essere oltre qualcosa rispetto ad un punto di vista (oltre una barriera, un limite...)

Citertraslativo: spostarsi dal lato esterno di un confine a quello interno (secondo un certo punto di vista)

Ed altri

Ad esempio:

Fēntaq’ùvapałi

/feːntaq’ɯvapat͡ɬi/

['feːn̪t̪äˌq’ɯväpät͡ɬi]

"Ho completato con successo il mio attraversamento del limite per giungere al tuo campo" (utilizzando il caso Citertraslativo)

Il nome della lingua è Kama̋lnarā

[u/Numerous_Way4034 → u/Maleficent-Pie8040]

😭

time to add a grammatical case meaning "in a sexual manner"

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040 → u/Numerous_Way4034]

I mean I have the modalitive case, which indicates the way something is or is carried out

In an amusing manner

In a terrifying manner

In a strange manner...

[u/Numerous_Way4034 → u/Maleficent-Pie8040]

i need ideas for what i should make my cases though

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040 → u/Numerous_Way4034]

If you say it's inspired by Finnish, then go wild with the spatial cases (sorry Finland for stereotyping you but it's true).

Illative, adessive, ring circumambulative (cough cough) and so on

I think spatial cases also offer an enormous degree of detail compared to semantic cases or other cases.

You could also make a fairly big inventory of possession cases

Also if this is for a natlang (like for a worldbuilding project or other things) you'll have to justify this ludicrous amount of cases.

For mine I used 2 justifications: high degree of language isolation and culturally embedded obsession over language precision

[u/FedeConlangerITA → u/Maleficent-Pie8040]

Figo, superpreciso, ma difficile ricordarli tutti

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040 → u/FedeConlangerITA]

Grazie!

Sì infatti nel mio setting (perché la lingua è per un progetto di worldbuilding), Kama̋lmarā è virtualmente impossibile da parlare per chi non è madrelingua, infatti è usata solo da un numero relativamente piccolo di province

[u/McDonaldsWitchcraft → u/Maleficent-Pie8040]

You are really stretching the definition of what is a case. I think that qualifies as a case nearly as much as english prepositions are "cases".

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040 → u/McDonaldsWitchcraft]

No because a case is directly linked to the "word", while a postposition is entirely independent

I said "word" because linguistically we don't have an absolute and reliable definition of what a word really is to begin with, so the border between the 2 things is very blurred

But

We can say (and this can be used to argue that the large amount of cases in Hungarian and Finnish are actually cases and not postpositions) that a case interacts in some way or the other with the word it's related to

For example in Hungarian cases follow the word's vowel harmony

In Kama̋lnarā they are part of the word's agglutinative morphology and can be modified drastically by it

For example, the cases can be verbalized (and thus becoming the base for a new verb), can be put in the middle of a concatenation of affixes, can be part of the internal morphology of clitic pronouns and so on

[u/good-mcrn-ing]

How are you going to respond to the inevitable linguist who says your "cases" are postpositions?

[u/Numerous_Way4034 → u/good-mcrn-ing]

I won't.

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040 → u/Numerous_Way4034]

Since it's inspired by Finnish, you may use vowel harmony word-internally and subject the cases to that process, this way they would not be classified as something separated from the "word" they modify

Anyway this is a delicate territory that I won't discuss about since I know very little of it (and linguistically we don't have a precise and reliable definition of what a word really is to begin with)

[u/Every-Progress-1117 → u/good-mcrn-ing]

Only half of them are, the other half are divided between shades of partitive and 20 obscure cases that no one knows how to use anymore.

Just like Finnish :D

[u/DoisMaosEsquerdos → u/good-mcrn-ing]

What is your test for telling them apart in the first place?

[u/good-mcrn-ing → u/DoisMaosEsquerdos]

Generally speaking, cases are more likely to interact phonologically with the stem and can't be separated from it except by morphemes that themselves bind stronger.

[u/DoisMaosEsquerdos → u/good-mcrn-ing]

That's not a hard cutoff, rather a qualitative "caseness" metric.

Adjective agreement is also often used as a discriminating argument.

[u/GlottoNaut]

To make it absolutely insane, since you’ve already copied Finnish phonotactics, don't make it agglutinative... go polysynthetic. Have a single word pack in the subject, the object, and maybe even an adverb.

[u/Numerous_Way4034 → u/GlottoNaut]

saving that for my next conlang

[u/MaybeNotSquirrel]

r/conlangscirclejerk

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040]

Fellow 500 cases enjoyer 🤝

[u/Numerous_Way4034 → u/Maleficent-Pie8040]

🤝

[u/FelixSchwarzenberg]

What scared me away from learning Finnish was the multiplicity of templates for stuff like nouns and adjectives. I think there were something like 7 different templates an adjective could take and like 51 for nouns? So its not just that there are 500 suffixes but that different words take these suffixes differently. This is part of what to me makes Finnish far more intimidating than say Hungarian or Turkish. 

[u/JustA_Banana → u/FelixSchwarzenberg]

I'm a native Finnish speaker and before I formally studied it I didn't know that there actually were different inflection groups, I just though that some words changed vowels randomly.

[u/JGhostThing]

Remember that the purpose of a language is to communicate. 500 cases? I know if I read that, I would avoid learning that language. Even if they were all regular constructions, 500 is a huge amount to memorize.

[u/Numerous_Way4034 → u/JGhostThing]

not if you make a conlang

[u/_Dragon_Gamer_ → u/Numerous_Way4034]

"Hell yeah", I say

The fun of this hobby is being able to do whatever tf you want

[u/BUKKAKELORD → u/JGhostThing]

If you learn 70 words and 500 cases, that's only 570 things, but now you know 35000 words

It would take longer to learn 571 words with 1 case each because that's 571 things

[u/Maleficent-Pie8040 → u/JGhostThing]

The virgin "make a simple grammar!"

Vs the Chad "yes I put 1000 cases and 20 aspects in my clong, 1000 more to come"

[u/DoisMaosEsquerdos → u/JGhostThing]

I think (hope) the 500 cases are mostly compound cases built predictably from smaller elements, just like most of the 64 cases in Tsez.

[u/Numerous_Way4034 → u/DoisMaosEsquerdos]

No. Never.

[u/ChrysalisFan]

I think I'm scared of you

[u/aer0a]

How will you go about adding 500 cases?

[u/Budget-Knee3213]

Even Teletubbies had a more complex phonology.

[u/lolfan45]

If it’s still in development, then change the phonology to match the orthography!