more like 15-20 i think, but yeah. but they’re far more regular and behave more like prepositions do in english.
the worst part of IE cases isnt that there’s so many of them (there arent, the most ever is like 8-9 and that’s in ancient languages i think), it’s that each little case marker means a multitude of things at once. see above how it ending in -i means it’s one of multiple possibilities, and each time that lone little -i is marking both case and number together.
so for the above Dative example, hungarian would have (contrived, yes, i know):
Odaadta a lovat a Brutusznak - He/She gave the horse to Brutus.
Odaadta a lovat a Brutuszoknak - He/She gave the horse to the Brutuses.
the -nak signifies the dative (more or less). the -(o)k is the plural. so a plural in dative is -oknak. it’s not some third thing, it’s just a concatenation of the individual suffixes marking number, case, etc.
Fascinating, but also kinda dumb. I’m glad that language is dead.
it’s dumb because it’s done wrong. indoeuropean cases are just stupid as fuck.
look at how it works in hungarian or finnish, those are sensible systems.
Isn’t Finnish the language with 38 verb tenses or something mad like that?
Translation
Järjestelmä is system everything else is added on top of that
New punk band name dropped
more like 15-20 i think, but yeah. but they’re far more regular and behave more like prepositions do in english.
the worst part of IE cases isnt that there’s so many of them (there arent, the most ever is like 8-9 and that’s in ancient languages i think), it’s that each little case marker means a multitude of things at once. see above how it ending in -i means it’s one of multiple possibilities, and each time that lone little -i is marking both case and number together.
so for the above Dative example, hungarian would have (contrived, yes, i know):
Odaadta a lovat a Brutusznak - He/She gave the horse to Brutus. Odaadta a lovat a Brutuszoknak - He/She gave the horse to the Brutuses.
the -nak signifies the dative (more or less). the -(o)k is the plural. so a plural in dative is -oknak. it’s not some third thing, it’s just a concatenation of the individual suffixes marking number, case, etc.
Cases for nouns, not verb tenses.
Czech still does this