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Date:      Mon, 25 Mar 96 11:22:17 MET
From:      Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de>
To:        joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
Cc:        freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, asami@cs.berkeley.edu
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT
Message-ID:  <199603251025.LAA01163@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de>
In-Reply-To: <199603232132.WAA25023@uriah.heep.sax.de>; from "J Wunsch" at Mar 23, 96 10:32 pm

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> 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



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