From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Mar 25 05:34:31 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id FAA23991 for chat-outgoing; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 05:34:31 -0800 (PST) Received: from haldjas.folklore.ee (Haldjas.folklore.ee [193.40.6.121]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id FAA23951 for ; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 05:33:38 -0800 (PST) Received: (from narvi@localhost) by haldjas.folklore.ee (8.6.12/8.6.12) id PAA24454; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 15:35:36 +0200 Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 15:35:35 +0200 (EET) From: Narvi To: Greg Lehey cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, asami@cs.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT In-Reply-To: <199603251025.LAA01163@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Eat good food, preserve nature, be nice to all nice people :) On Mon, 25 Mar 1996, Greg Lehey wrote: > > 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. > Newer? Older? In real old Sanskrit and friends it wasn't so. But that isn't the thing that makes the grammars similar/different. It's not easier for me to learn Latin or Greek than any modern language as the "similarity might suggest. > > 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.) How comes the slavic languages don't have prepositions? At least in Russian there are. > > Precisely. > Greg > Sander