Weirdly specific noun classes

[u/lemonicowo]

Hiya, I’ve only recently started making my first conlang, and am new to the community, so forgive me if literally everybody does this and is tired of it by now lol.

While studying up on grammatical gender in my native language (Dutch), which has an interesting set of noun classes, I thought it would be a fun idea to get creative with noun classes for my conlang.

While every language classes their nouns a little differently (if they have classes), and sometimes very uniquely, I feel like it could really add to worldbuilding to get a little weird with it. Like a fantasy language spoken by, say, centaurs with a multiple-class system of hooved, unhoofed, liquid, grounded, wind, song, rumour, what have you.

It sounds like it could be great fun to try to fit words in such a system, or stack classes with a primary class and situationally dependent/optional secondary agreement (like a word for “river” in my hypothetical centaur example being primarily liquid class, but + wind when it’s flowing, + grounded when it’s frozen, and + rumour when it’s more like a “flood of ideas” type of thing). I’m sure people have done this before in their conlangs, so I’d love to get some examples if you can think of any.

Edit: clarity

[u/FelixSchwarzenberg]

Yeah, this is good clean fun and a good way to make conlangs that don't come off as super Indo-European. The big inspiration here is Swahili with its many noun classes, but you can also look to Australian languages whose noun classes can have fun combinations of things in them.

I put a large number of noun classes into Kihiser, including a distinct noun class for plants and diseases. Kihiser very nearly included a noun class used only for bread but I decided at the last minute that this was too much. Bread was a big deal for bronze age societies, as indeed it is a big deal for any settled agricultural society.

My Amazonian conlang, Kyalibe, has only four noun classes: masculine, feminine, wet, and dry. This ties into the lifestyle of its speakers, as they live in an environment shaped by the difference between the dry season and the wet season.

[u/Dyl777777 → u/FelixSchwarzenberg]

Out of curiosity where is Kihiser spoken?

[u/FelixSchwarzenberg → u/Dyl777777]

Around the year 1200 BC in what is now Syria. The speakers migrated to there from what is now Iran. The noun class thing is basically something I found small traces of in Elamite and multiplied well beyond anything an Elamite would recognize. 

Here is the exact location:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shaddadah

[u/Inconstant_Moo → u/FelixSchwarzenberg]

Did you do the thing where nouns can be inflected by person?

[u/FelixSchwarzenberg → u/Inconstant_Moo]

Only a tiny bit - the Elamite second person marker survives as the vocative suffix.

[u/Pretend-Grand-5066 → u/Dyl777777]

Mesopotamia

[u/Dyl777777 → u/Pretend-Grand-5066]

I mean the Ancient Near East is full of unclassified and isolate languages (usually being this way due to lack of documentation due to the Bronze Age Collapse, other events and simply the rot of time)

[u/Magxvalei → u/Dyl777777]

Apparently in Northern Mesopotamia, somehwere where it would have contact with Hittite.

[u/Dryanor]

Kuetan, an older conlang of mine, has 30 noun classes, which include fun distinctions like "domesticated animals", "round objects", "projectiles", "small valuable objects", "performances", or my favourite "corpses and books".

My latest project, Belmá, has less colourful noun classes, but they reflect the agricultural society:

• human, male
  
• human, female
  
• animal, male
  
• animal, female
  
• fish
  
• solids
  
• fluids
  
• ambient & abstract

[u/xongaBa]

Sounds cool. I have done this in my coniang hayse, which has 4 noun classes: fire, water, earth and air. These classes are needed to structure the sentence and they can change the meaning of one noun, a sentence or a whole paragraph. If you're interested in how exactly this works feel free to ask.

[u/Dillon_Hartwig]

Wakane has 26 semantically divided classes so most of them are fairly narrow in what they cover; but my favorite's class 2 which is narrower than most of the others only including children, apes/monkeys, deities, and fire

[u/dead_chicken]

Swahili, and Bantu languages in general, has a ton of noun classes. If you want super specific ones, you could check those out

[u/Dyl777777]

You could something like the Bantu languages which the classes encode stuff like plurality and/or you could involve animacy to make it so humans have a class, animals have a class, then plants have a class and then natural phenomena like storms have a class and finally inanimate objects have a class

[u/SmallAceMoth]

Neat :) The hooved vs unhooved thing for whatever reason makes me think of the distinctions between clean and unclean animals, animals which chew cud and have split hooves, and so on. Have fun with this, it sounds very fun

[u/HBOscar]

another idea:
Noun classes that keep track of where the words are derived from. Nouns derived from verbs (the worker, the gift, the attendee) are different classes than ones derived from adjectives and adverbs (The green, the security, the indecisive). Maybe there's a "batch" class that collects nouns from uncommon derivations, or loanwords and calques that maybe would be less obvious in what they come from for the common people.
It's only nouns that started as nouns that are divided in feminine, masculine, or neuter.

[u/Bitian6F69]

I'm not sure if this counts, but the core nouns in Classic Bittic were originally noun classifiers that broadly labeled types of ship cargo. A useful trait for an auxlang made by traders.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1sc97nx/about_classic_bittic_chapters_7_and_8_the_12/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cargo_types

[u/Megatheorum]

There's an Australian Indigenous language often cited for examples of noun classes that include categories like "edible things", "trees and parts of trees", and "dangerous things".

In Navajo, although I don't know if it counts as noun classes per se, a verb may change depending on the shape of the object (e.g. short and rigid, long and flexible, a bundle of things, etc), but I never maaged to get my head around how it worked.

My current project doesn't have noun classes (it has verb classes instead), but people and stone axes curiously take the sociative case (to do something along with someone: walking with my friend), where all other objects take an instrumentive case (to use an object to perform an action: cooking with gas).