From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Mar 25 05:37:58 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id FAA24183 for chat-outgoing; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 05:37:58 -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 FAA24173 for ; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 05:37:47 -0800 (PST) Received: (from nerv@localhost) by nixpbe.pdb.sni.de (8.6.12/8.6.12) id OAA11551 for freebsd-chat@freebsd.org; Mon, 25 Mar 1996 14:36:38 +0100 Message-Id: <199603251336.OAA11551@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT To: narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee (Narvi) Date: Mon, 25 Mar 96 14:33:47 MET From: Greg Lehey Cc: lehey.pad@sni.de, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, asami@cs.berkeley.edu In-Reply-To: ; from "Narvi" at Mar 25, 96 3:35 pm X-Mailer: xmail 2.4 (based on ELM 2.2 PL16) Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > 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