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Hi all, I'm revisiting an Armenian based conlang I started back in 2005 - in fact, I'm giving it a complete overhaul, though much of the original inspiration is still there. For some background, this conlang (which strives for natural-ness but not necessarily plausibility) operates on the model of an Armenian language which had much of its vocabulary replaced with Persian and Semitic, and has a grammar that shaped by much contact with area languages: Greek, Turkish, Kurdish and other Persian languages... Romani, colloquial Neo-Aramaic dialects, Mandaic, Cappadocian Greek and the Balkan Language Union have provided much of the inspiration for contact-induced structural borrowing and restructuring. Inspired by Cappadocian Greek and the Balkan Language Union, I was planning on having a noun system with three cases: direct, oblique and vocative. The vocative I cobbled together based on similarities and coincidences across the BLU and Kurdish influence on certain dialects of Modern Neo-Aramaic; I reasoned that my "Armenian" could likewise borrow a vocative based on Kurdish. The direct is, of course, the nominative. The oblique, however, is giving me some trouble (mostly because I'm stubborn). Like Cappadocian Greek, I want an agglutinative case ending. Whereas the dative and genitive falls together, the Armenian accusative is mostly the nominative, I reasoned that the oblique would be derived from the genitive. Cappadocian derives its agglutinative genitive from the Greek group 2 neuter genitive ending -ju. Cappadocian simply tags this to the noun, regardless of provenance. One problem I have with this is that I don't like the vision of all of those new -Cj- sounds that will result from adding -ju to nouns that end in consonants. Also, borrowing the Greek - ju seems too hodgepodge, sticking to all the Armenian, Semitic and Persian nouns that will make up the vocabulary of the language. I thought of using the Armenian genitive, but from which declension? -i and -u are the most common; and Kurdish has a feminine oblique in -i. Does it make much sense to generalize the -i and tag it on to all nouns? What of nouns that end in vowels? I think I don't care for the aesthetics but I can probably live with it if enough voices support it. ^_^ I'm tempted to even scrap the oblique entirely, or make some kind of optional case to tag objects when they don't appear in their usual locations within the sentence... not sure... Any ideas??? Also like Cappadocian Greek (and Armenian) I want an agglutinative plural... I'm thinking (somewhat inspired by Mandaic's borrowing of Persian plural endings) of having Armenian -(n)er for inanimate nouns and Persian -an for animate nouns. How does this sound? Cheers, Eamon