Age case

[Ashroot]

i am looking to add an age case to my conlang where built into the word is a case that indicates what age group an object goes to like:
Dentures-old people
Braises-Young people
Stove-(insert age group)+
and so on.
I was also going to add on gender case and possibly animinity.

[con quesa]

Having the sort of age-based case you're describing doesn't really make sense. Noun case is fundamentally a way of indicating what role a particular noun plays in the syntax of a particular sentence. So it doesn't make sense for, say, dentures to "be in" some sort of old-person case, for the reason that "being associated with old people" isn't a role a noun can play in the sentence like subject or addressee or object of a verb or adposition is.

You might be thinking of noun *classes*, which are different from case. A noun class is something based on the semantics of the noun, and could very well be marked on the noun explicitly (-o/a in Spanish, the various prefixes in Bantu languages), but it doesn't need to be (English). "Stereotypically used by age group X" is kind of a weird thing to base a noun class system on, and I very much doubt that any natural langauge does this, but if you're not overly concerned about realism you could very well make such a system for your conlang. But it's not what you'd call case.

[Miekko]

Do you know what a case is in normal linguistic terminology?

[Ashroot]

Yes class thank you case didn't seem right I just didn't know what was.

[linguoboy]

"Stove"?

[Aurora Rossa]

"Stove"?

Quite. What the hell kind of noun case is "stove"?

[Ashroot]

I am thinking 14+. It is what that object's age group is. It was a primitive thought that I thought might work. Toys 7-. You know built in age appropriateness.

[Chuma]

So what you're saying is, you're going to have noun classes which divide nouns by which age group they are associated with?

Okay, it's an interesting idea. Most likely the vast majority of words will not be possible to assign to a category in a logical way. Consider the nouns in the previous sentence: "majority", "word", "category", "way". What class would they be?

But of course that is equally true for gender (which is after all just another kind of noun class). You just have to either have a really big category for "other", or live with the fact that most of the assignments are arbitrary.

[vec]

Worth noting: Indonesian and Malay often have different words for younger and older people: adik 'younger sibling' and kakak 'older sibling'. This an idea that could be expanded on.

[Soap]

Kuroras sort of does this, you can think of the baby/child words as dimunitives of the others though. I prefer to think of the cases as genders, with the gender of inanimate objects being transferred to it by the person who possesses it. Each gender is marked by changing internal consonants in the word. So for example the basic word laŋì "blanket" can change to lapì, where -p- marks the "baby" gender, and it then means "diaper" (a primitive culture's diaper is likely to be little more than a cloth blanket). Most of these words, however, are animates where the gender refers to the noun itself, and not something it possesses (.e.g lăti "husband" versus lămi "wife"). Also, many inaminate objects have no age-based redefinitions. The potnetial for using this for diminutives instead of literal age/size, though, could go quite a long way.

[cybrxkhan]

Worth noting: Indonesian and Malay often have different words for younger and older people: adik 'younger sibling' and kakak 'older sibling'. This an idea that could be expanded on.

Quite a number of Asian languages do this, actually. Chinese and Vietnamese definitely, and Japanese as well.

[Xephyr]

"Stove"?

Quite. What the hell kind of noun case is "stove"?

At least one South American language has a noun classifier affix for "canoe", so maybe "stove" isn't quite so strange.

[roninbodhisattva]

"Stove"?

Quite. What the hell kind of noun case is "stove"?

At least one South American language has a noun classifier affix for "canoe", so maybe "stove" isn't quite so strange.

Is it really a grammaticalized case specifically and just for 'canoe'...or is it also for things that look like canoes, other kinds of boats, etc?

[Radius Solis]

And are we sure it's a classifier for canoes or might it be a lexical affix?

[Xephyr]

"Stove"?

Quite. What the hell kind of noun case is "stove"?

At least one South American language has a noun classifier affix for "canoe", so maybe "stove" isn't quite so strange.

Is it really a grammaticalized case specifically and just for 'canoe'...or is it also for things that look like canoes, other kinds of boats, etc?

Does it matter?

And are we sure it's a classifier for canoes or might it be a lexical affix?

My source is this sentence's morphological analysis, given in the Tariana chapter of Changing Valency:

ita-whya hi-nuku pi-pale-ta
canoe-CL:CANOE DEM:ANIM-TOP.NOM.A/S 2sg-put+CAUS1-CAUS2
"Put the canoe here"

[roninbodhisattva]

"Stove"?

Quite. What the hell kind of noun case is "stove"?

At least one South American language has a noun classifier affix for "canoe", so maybe "stove" isn't quite so strange.

Is it really a grammaticalized case specifically and just for 'canoe'...or is it also for things that look like canoes, other kinds of boats, etc?

Does it matter?

Well, it'd be a lot more interesting if there was a distinct classifier for a single (maybe not single, but extremely small class) lexical item which referred to a canoe, yes.

[Xephyr]

How many different kinds of boats do you figure the Tariana make other than canoes?

[Radius Solis]

If it's a classifier though, I might expect it to also be used with things that are associated with canoes, such as whatever terms they have for parts of canoes, and maybe oars/poles, potentially even up to canoe-operators and their gear or attire. It might also, or instead, be used with compounds and other words that don't have much to do with canoes anymore but derive from morphemes that do or did. If either of those is the case, a "canoe" classifier would not surprise me too much in a culture that heavily uses them, since there are languages with upwards of a hundred distinct classifiers so you would expect there to be some quite specific ones in such large systems.

The only really surprising thing would be a "canoe" classifier that appeared only with one or two or three nouns that specifically mean "canoe". Although it's true there are precedents even there; Haida has several such, IIRC.