From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Mar 25 02:25:59 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id CAA11535 for chat-outgoing; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 02:25:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from nixpbe.pdb.sni.de (mail.sni.de [192.109.2.33]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id CAA11528 for ; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 02:25:45 -0800 (PST) Received: (from nerv@localhost) by nixpbe.pdb.sni.de (8.6.12/8.6.12) id LAA01163 for freebsd-chat@freebsd.org; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 11:25:09 +0100 Message-Id: <199603251025.LAA01163@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Date: Mon, 25 Mar 96 11:22:17 MET From: Greg Lehey Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, asami@cs.berkeley.edu In-Reply-To: <199603232132.WAA25023@uriah.heep.sax.de>; from "J Wunsch" at Mar 23, 96 10:32 pm X-Mailer: xmail 2.4 (based on ELM 2.2 PL16) Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > As Narvi wrote: > >> And there really aren't that many >> special cases (I haven't yet found out how you make sure from which >> gender a given word is other than learning by heart). Perhaps you should >> consider hard languages in which there are 14 or more cases. > > Well, languages with many different grammatical cases usually replace > prepositions by cases. In fact, within the Indo-European languages, it's the other way round: older languages, such as Latin and Greek, use endings to indicate case, person, number and tense. Newer languages, such as English, replace them with prepositions. > This is actually not much harder to learn than learning the correct > usage of the prepositions. (I don't know about Hungarian that > doesn't have prepositions, but i know it from Slavic languages.) Precisely. Greg