Re: Theory about the evolution of languages

Well, as I said, this was only an idea. Yes, hungarian has two simple
tenses, but you can't say that the future construction doesn't denote a
tense. The same is true for Frensh, where the future proche ( I hope I
spelled that right) may not be a simple tense, but it does describe when
the action took place ( my definition of a tense, maybe it's wrong). I
didn't say the tense system of Latin is simpler than that of Frensh, or
that Hungarian cases are more complex than Latin ones, but there are more
tenses/aspects in frensh than in Latin and there are less cases in Frensh.
English does have a third case, the genitive. It is actualy the
only 'real' case in the sense that it is inflected. Example: "This is
Tim's ball." That "'s" on Tim is the genitive ending. It is also present
in German, where it is formed like this: "Das ist Tims Ball." The "s" is
the genitive ending. The other cases in German, Dative, Nominative and
Acusative, are formed by declinating the article. This is also done with
the genitive, but it is the only case where the article is replaced by a
noun (Tim in this case). But even though the noun isn't touched in all
three cases, they are still regarded as cases. The same, then, should be
true for tenses.

PS:Thanks for the reply :)

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