I Must Decline

Three noun classes, "genders" if you want to be traditional about it: wind, stone, word (otherwise known as animate, inanimate, and abstract).  The wind class includes a lot of stuff that English speakers think of as inanimate--water, especially bodies of water, fire, wind, missiles, groups of people considered as entities capable of independent actions (for English equivalents, think "the White House announced..." or "the mob ran..."), families, clans and tribes, and so forth.  This is aside from the normal stuff like people, animals and plants.  If it appears capable of independent action, it's animate.  That "appears" is very important.

Inanimate stuff is: corpses, tools that never leave the hand of the user (as a result, a bow is of the stone class but an arrow is wind!), body parts (alive but under the control of the being), most geographical features when considered as purely material, minerals, rocks, cut wood, and other materials, etc.

Abstracts: qualities, emotions, spirits and gods.  As a result of this last, one can decline many stone- and wind-class words as if they were word-class, and get the effect of "Platonic Ideal" or "Spirit of"--kemal, mountain, when declined as a word-class noun, takes on the meaning "the Spirit of the Mountain" or perhaps "the Ideal Mountain" or "the model for all mountains".

 Also there are six cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative and instrumentive.  Since pluralization is handled by playing with the root vowel, there's only one set of case endings per gender.

So you take your root: sofl-, tok-, pen-, and add a stem vowel to get soflo-, toku-, peni-.  Then you pick the case and add appropriate endings: sofloþ, the wind (nom), soflona, the wind's, tokudi, at the stone, pinigo, using words. T, d, s and n assimilate to retroflex if the final consonant of the root is retroflex.

The citation form is root+stem vowel.

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