Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 25 Mar 1996 15:35:35 +0200 (EET)
From:      Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee>
To:        Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de>
Cc:        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:  <Pine.BSF.3.91.960325152938.24377B-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee>
In-Reply-To: <199603251025.LAA01163@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help


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



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.91.960325152938.24377B-100000>