Anyway, let's consider a toy language for illustrative purposes:
Nominal roots have the form CVC. Case suffixes have the form -VC. Verbal roots have the form CVCV. Basic word order is SOV.
The toy language has the following phoneme inventory:
Vowels: /a e i o u/
Consonants: /m n f v p b t d k g s r l j/
This language features the following cases:
- -us nominative
- -um accusative
- -is genitive
- -it dative
- -at locative
- -ol temporal
- -ar instrumental
Here's a few auto-generated noun roots:
- tet man nominative
- lit woman nominative
- bet hill locative
- koj home locative
- mev morning temporal
- vur apple accusative
- pev hammer instrumental
- sol pen instrumental
- kif letter accusative
- bebi give
- paja hit
- jamu sleep
- poto run
- lopa eat
tet litum paja
man.NOM woman-ACC hit
The man hit the woman.
lit vur koj mev lopa
woman.NOM apple.ACC home.LOC morning.TEMP eat
The woman ate the apple at home in the morning.
Notice how in this most recent sentence, complex meaning can be communicated without any explicit case marking. Nevertheless, this system also allows for free word order:
koj vur lopa mev lit
home.LOC apple.ACC eat morning.TEMP woman.NOM
This sentence still expresses the same idea as the above, but with a different word order. However, suppose you wanted to express something a little more unusual:
vurus tetum lopa
apple-NOM man-ACC eat
The apple eats the man.
It appears to be that this system is something along the lines of an animacy hierarchy, just more generalized, but I'd curious to hear what you all think. Is there a case of ANADEW lurking out there somewhere?