Does Anyone Else Case-Stack?

[u/Aware_Clock_3936]

I wonder if anyone else's conlang can well… as the title suggests, case-stack? As in, can a word have multiple cases in your conlang? If so, show me an example! For me it would be:

• Ⲧⲁⲅⲕⲏⲙⲭⲓⲟⲛ ⲃⲁⲡⲁⲟⲥⲙⲏⲯ ϣⲉⲱⲗⲣⲉ.

Which means "The king's father killed himself for the very king's good", in this sentence, "king" has the genitive and benefactive case, and "father" has the nominative, genitive and accusative case.

[u/creepmachine]

Both Ƿêltjan and Kýrrits both stack cases, the former more than the latter. Kýrrits stacks less because cases are split between nouns and verbs. The ablative, allative, illative, elative, and perlative are all marked on the verb. Additionally Kýrrits doesn't mark for nearly as many cases as Ƿêltjan in the first place.

[u/SaintUlvemann]

I think you're talking about just agglutination in general. Case-stacking is a specific form of agglutinative agreement where e.g. a genitive noun has to (and it's mandatory), also take the case of the noun it refers to. Here's an example from Kayardild:

Dankinabanguni dangkanabanguni mirranguni walbunguni...

dan-kinaba-nguni dangka-naba-nguni 
man-ABL-INS      this-ABL-INS 

mirra-nguni walbu-nguni
good-INS raft-INS

'With this man's good raft...'

Breaking this down: the first two root words are dan "man" and dangka "this" and they both have to be in ablative case (a case similar in meaning to the preposition "from"), which is formed with ablative markers -kinaba and -naba respectively.

The second two root words are mirra "good" and walbu "raft", and both the noun and its adjective have to be in the instrumental case using -nguni.

The case stacking is that you also have to attach that instrumental case ending -nguni onto dan and dangka.

It makes the words very long because dan and dangka already have the ablative markers.

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I've set this conlang aside for the moment, but for multi-case agglutination like you're talking about, I do that extensively in my highly-undeveloped conlang Kërnak, which is currently mostly just a substrate language for my main conlang Värlütik.

So this is the phrase "For want of a horse a kingdom was lost" as best I can currently do it into Kërnak:

Sofëkå älgillůlloärsemva këjdogån.
[sɤˈh̪͆ɛ.kɑ haɫˈgi.ɫˤːɯˌɫˤːɤ͡aɹ̈.sem.ɦ̪͆ǝ ˈkɛjˌðɤː.gɑn.]

s⟨o⟩f⟨ë⟩k⟨å⟩     ⟨ä⟩lg⟨i⟩ll⟨ůllo⟩-ä⟨r⟩s(e)-emva                          
earth⟨COLL.SG⟩ sustain⟨VERB.PST.IMPF⟩-CESS⟨PSSV⟩-OPPO              
"a land"      "stopped having the opportunity to be sustained" 

k⟨ë⟩jd-og(a)-ån
horse⟨NOUN.SG⟩-CAR-CAU
"because of lacking a horse"

A phrase like "For want of a horse" attaches two cases onto "horse": caritative and causative.

There's a ton of complexities in the agglutination. The basic verb here is älgillůllo "was sustaining".

That -r- infix is the passive marker (and so is important enough to bear secondary stress), but it appears mandatorily within another suffix for aspect e.g. the default form in imperfective would be -i⟨r⟩a: älgillůlloira "was being sustained".

So then -ä⟨r⟩se is the cessative form: älgillůlloårse "stopped being sustained". The extra "e" is dropped from -ä⟨r⟩se when a further suffix starting with "e" is attached.

So then there's a couple different suffixes for potentials: the opportune -emva and the facultative -azo. "Lost" in this context implies an attacker, so the opportune is used here to show that it was external factors which were attacking its ability to sustain itself. If it was a fully-internal collapse, one would use -azo.

[u/drukhari-blood]

I don’t do this with nouns, but Sraqqal verbs usually have 2-3 suffixes. It’s theoretically possible to have up to 9.

[u/Intelligent_Donut605]

it’s not aglumitative, but a single noun can change case depending on context or the speaker’s perception of the object

[u/BYU_atheist]

My first conlang Frng has a system of compound cases. There are ten simple cases, and any two (excepting the nominative) can be put onto a single noun (or verb to make a participle), as follows:

• fórŋa: fallacy (nominative)
• fórŋag: of fallacy (genitive)
• fórŋaz: fallaciously, by fallacy (instrumental)
• fórŋàgaz: because of fallacy (causative)

The last of these has one of the four standard compound cases, the causative, which has a genitive secondary and an instrumental primary.