Comment by d1sxeyes
2 years ago
It's pretty hard to come up with examples of how something does not exist. I don't know if the article has been revised since it was posted, but now it uses proper nouns instead of pronouns.
Another minor nit, verbs conjugate, nouns decline. Otherwise I quite enjoyed the article, although the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic (never studied Latvian, but have some experience in learning various languages with case systems with varying degrees of success).
English sentences with pronouns can show that cases exist in English, rather than that they don't.
Without cases "she gave her number to him" becomes "she gave she number to he".
Yet, that is precisely what we have when we substitute concrete names for the pronouns, except for the possessive: "Alice gave Alice's number to Bob".
Pronoun cases and possessives convey the flavor of what it's like to use a language with full-blown case. You just have to use your imagination: what if all the nouns have cases, and there are six or seven of those cases.
More cases means that, for instance, rather than one "her" word that can be used as "give to her", "do to her", "her number", "go with her" , the language will have different declensions.
I think using pronouns with cases like I / me / my as a contrast to other nouns like "dog" would convey the difference.
> the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic
At the very least. I'm thinking of Latin, where you can and will have ambiguity which declension a noun belongs to and what gender it is (e.g. frūctus (4th, m) vs pecus (3rd, f) vs pectus (3rd, n) vs actus (2nd, m)), and you just have to memorize which is which, since that entirely changes its endings as well as that of the corresponding adjective. Third declension is also wacky in that the stem isn't always present, e.g. pectus -> pectoris (where the stem here is pector-).