Noun Declension

Just like verbs conjugate, nouns decline! But verbs are complicated so I'll start with nouns. Nouns decline based on number, class, case, and definiteness. Let's go through each one:

Number should remind you of singular vs. plural, but there is much more to it. Some languages like Latin have single, double, and plural. Some even have triple! There's also a paucal form for a few of a thing (in these languages plural means 'many of a thing.') Even weird ones exist like distributive, which describe a noun being distributed across multiple places/things.

There are also mass nouns (English includes water, fire, rice) which don't have plural forms, but instead have to be measured with some amount. Think 'three drops of water' instead of 'three waters'.

Noun class gives more information about the noun's purpose in the sentence. In English, we have the Saxon genitive: the 's. This means the noun is in possession of something else. Some languages have the instrumental case, that denotes that the noun is a tool or even an locative case, which denotes something near the noun. You could even make English prepositions into noun cases!

Every single language is either nominative/accusative or ergative/absolutive. To explain this, we need to talk about verbs a bit. Some verbs have just a subject and nothing else (intransitive) while others have objects that go along with them (transitive). Most western languages are nominative/accusative, which means the subject of intransitive verbs are marked the same as the agent of transitive verbs. Other languages, however, mark the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs the same. Example:

Nom/Acc: He sleeps. He likes her.

Erg/Abs: She sleeps. Him likes She.

In English, we only distinguish on pronouns. 'He' is subject/agent, and 'him' is the patient. If we used 'he' for subject/patient and 'him' for the agent English would be erg/abs. To make things more complicated, erg/abs languages never are only erg/abs; they are either that or nom/acc depending on the situation.

Noun class divides nouns into groups and marks them. The most obvious western examples are gender systems, and actually, noun classes are called gender systems regardless of if they are based on biological sex or not. Fun fact: English used to have a gender system! Ever wonder why 'blond' is for boys and 'blonde' is for girls? Think about it. Anyways, all this stuff seems like a lot of work so I will not include it in pablang.

Lastly, we have definiteness. This distinguishes definite nouns (has referent or has been reffered to previously) and indefinite nouns (no refferent or is new to the conversation). In English we encode this information on the article: 'the' vs 'a/an'. Oh yeah, and pablang won't have articles.

Pablang will have:

• Number: Single, Paucal, Plural forms of non-mass-noun nouns, and mass nouns
• Case: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative (marks the object of the sentence)
• Class: No class system
• Definiteness: Definite/Indefinite

Check the same google sheet from last time (the second tab) for how I inflect this. It looks like my nouns are really going to get long fast! This means it is agglutinative, meaning each prefix/suffix means one things. Analitical means you have one meaning per morpheme but they don't compound much. Oppositely, you can have a fusional system which has one affix that encodes multiple meanings a la Spanish verbs. My verbs will be fusional, but my nouns agglutinative.

And on that note, I consider nouns DONE!