The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Rorschach FritosI'm not so sure I want to deal with such a case system yet; I might eventually, but not yet.

Quote from: limetomNot really.  I don't know of any language that has both.  Generally, you have one or the other.

In isolating languages, that is, languages where the ideal is one morpheme-per-word, you don't have a case system, so you generally don't have a noun class system.  Isolating languages are generally the ones that have classifiers.

In synthetic languages, where the ideal is typically more than one morpheme-per-word, you often have a case system, so you often have a noun class system as well.

These two, however, are not set in stone.  Chinese is regarded as a very isolating language, yet has a ton of compounds, which are two words put together to make a new word (e.g. ç"Ÿæ—¥ / shÄ"ngri 'birthday' < ç"Ÿ+æ—¥ / shÄ"ng 'birth; life' + ri 'day').  Middle Japanese is much more synthetic than modern Japanese, but still has monomorphemic words (e.g. æˆ / tuki 'moon'; cf. うã'たまはã,‰ãšã,‰ã,' / uketamafar-az-ar-am-u 'wouldn't one listen [to something someone of higher status says]').


Definitions for Stuff I Mentioned:
Morphemes, remember, are the smallest unit of meaning in language.  Words are composed of one or more morphemes.  So by some of the words I've used in this sentence and the last, we can see that English isn't an isolating language (i.e. morpheme-s, small-est, compose-d, etc.).

A case system adds a morpheme to words to indicate some grammatical relation.  Old English had cases, but for the most part, modern English doesn't.  This can still in English pronouns (like how you can't switch 'he' and 'him').  In a very simple sentence, you have a subject, verb, and object (abbreviated S, V, and O, respectively).  The order of these three varies from language to language.  For example:
[note]For full completeness sake, the meaning of the above sentences is not exactly the same.  The English verb kick and the Japanese verb ke-ru, both mean, simply, 'to hit with the foot'.  The Irish verb, ciceáil, means specifically 'to kick a ball (as in soccer)'.  The Latin verb, calcitrare means specifically 'to kick with the heel'.  Remember that the Romans wore open-toed sandals, so kicking with any other part of the foot was dangerous.[/note]
[th]English[/th][th]Japanese[/th][th]Irish[/th][th]Latin[/th]

Jean (S) kicked (V) the ball (O).

Jiin-ga (S) booru-wo (O) ke-tta. (V)

Chiceáil (V) Síne (S) an peil (O).

Ioann-a (S) calcitr-at (V) pil-am (O).

These three variations in word order, SOV (Japanese), SVO (English and Latin), and VSO (Irish) - in that order - are the most common in languages.  

Here, both English as well as (to a lesser extent) Irish have lost case marking.  Japanese and Latin still have it.  Subjects in Japanese are marked with -ga, and objects with -wo.  Latin has multiple noun classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter), as well as several structural varieties (declensions).  Here, we see subject marking in the first declension is -a, and object marking in the first declension is -am.  Case marking is obligatory in Classical Latin, while you can, in spoken Japanese, leave out case marking a lot of the time.