Date: Mon, 25 Mar 96 14:33:47 MET From: Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de> To: narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee (Narvi) Cc: lehey.pad@sni.de, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, asami@cs.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT Message-ID: <199603251336.OAA11551@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960325152938.24377B-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee>; from "Narvi" at Mar 25, 96 3:35 pm
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> 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. I thought Sanskrit made significant use of inflections. That doesn't stop it from having prepositions as well, of course--I specifically referred to "case, person, number and tense. > 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. Why should it be? I wouldn't see much in the way of similarity. >>> 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. I'm not sure I understand this. Of course the slavic languages have prepositions. But Russian, like German, has a more inflected syntax than, say, English or French. I think that this is what the original poster (name lost) meant. Greg
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