Quote:
Originally Posted by Yapyap
Only seven cases, pfft.  Almost all Finno-Ugric languages have well over ten. Estonian has fourteen, Finnish has fifteen (although they don't really use some of them for some weird reason and there are disagreements over whether accusative should be considered a separate case or not), Hungarian has, er, lots more (eighteen regular cases but "altogether 34 grammatical cases and case-like suffixes", Wikipedia tells me).
And while some of the languages, such as Finnish, are extremely regular in how the cases are formed (at least in written language), Estonian is rich in stem changes and irregularity, so you can't really just "learn the rules" and go from that but you just need to learn the words and the stem changes in genitive and partitive in order to be able to inflect/decline the words.
On the other hand we don't have grammatical gender, which makes things a whole lot nicer. Or articles. And no prepositions (although I think in modern language the usage of two words that used to be strictly post-positions has shifted and they're often used as prepositions now). And verbs are much easier (well, to me anyway) than, say, the Russian verb system. Then again, I think the English verb system and tenses are easy, too... |
Interesting facts about the cases. Finish/Hungarian/Estonian are not usually on most people's radar screen, but known to be difficult. Strange though, since these are languages of Asian origin. And the Asian languages I know or have read something about don't have any cases at all, Chinese and Vietnamese just use an add-on word that indicates possession (and Japanese seems to have picked that up as well, even though it is not related) -- and even that can be dropped in many cases as the word order already tells you everything you need to know (if you say "I mother" then it is clear that it means "my mother". The cases are among the most difficult things to comprehend for most Asians learning a Western language.