Nouns

Nouns play a large part in the discussion of any natural language's grammar. But I have to believe that anyone interested in making up their own language will have given considerable thought to nouns before they start. Other than reminding about some options I won't say much.

Besides whether to use case, you have the option of how to show number or whether to show number at all as a part of your nouns. Mandarin nouns do not show number, for instance. If you want your nouns to show number you can be creative and include the idea of 'some', 'many' or 'none of' in your noun as well as singular and plural. Though it's a complicating factor Russian uses a singular noun with any number ending in 1, and different noun forms with numbers ending in 2,3 or 4 from the forms with and those numbers ending in any other number.

There is nothing exciting about the simple nouns in my own language. All of them end in stressed -a in the singular and all of them can take one of two related endings for the plural. One ending keeps the stress on the end of the word and the other moves it back one syllable. It's purely for euphony.

I will discuss noun suffixes at a later time, because they are a very critical part of my own language, but as a demonstration of how you can get creative with your noun structure I show you one trick I've added.

Noun suffixes in my language are not added directly to the stem. Instead there is a link vowel. In my language the link vowel can carry it's own meaning.

The word for 'magic' is woba
11-year-old Harry Potter is a wobuka, a general term for wizard.
Dumbledore is also a wobuka, but also a wobaka, a wizard famous for his magic skill.
11-year-old Neville Longbottom is a kiro wobika a poor wizard who isn't much good at magic.
Lord Voldemort is a påyo wobika an evil wizard, though those who fear him would certainly call him a wobaka instead.