R: Re: New to the list

Cristophe wrote:

> Well, then you don't know about Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Basque,
etc... They
> certainly have at least as many endings as Latin :) .
Finnish 14 cases, Hungarian about 22(?) and Turkish even more... Basque I
don't know... I remember only the three core cases (ergative -k,
absolutive -0 and dative -i) Then there are Kartavelian languages... a
nightmare (the most difficult part is not the ending itself, but the fact of
being able to reach the ending of the word : )! If you want to see a lang
with few cases (4) but with an enormously difficult morphology (umlauts and
such nice things), take a look at Icelandic. Russian's also really
difficult... yet there are lotsa people that naturally speak it, and they
don't have great problems with it.

> Also, Latin is a natural
> language. It's dead, but it's a natural language, so if Latin had so many
> endings (and that's a matter of taste, personnally I don't think it has
that
> many endings, but maybe it's because I'm French), why not other languages?
Ah! We Italians have more endings than you, our dear Frenchies ; ) Remember
that Romance langs have developped a *much* more difficult verbal system
than Latin's one (even if many tenses are not syntetically constructed).

> I
> don't think Ancient Romans had any difficulty speaking Latin (and if you
oppose
> me that most people didn't speak Classical Latin but Vulgar Latin, I will
answer
> that the people that could write Classical Latin could certainly speak it
> without much trouble). I think it's the same with Sanskrit. And I also
think
> that Hindi, the official language of India, has also lots of inflections.
But my
> knowledge of Hindi is next to nothing, so I may be wrong. Correct me if I
am.

Well, dunno about Hindi, but some Indian langs have reached the bottom...
from the Vedic language they've come down with a language with less
inflections than English itself, and they've already started to
re-grammaticalize (at least this is what I've read on Cyril Babaev's site).

Luca