Depends on your position on that. Special military operation to give Christmas back its rightful place in the year.

The war on Christmas…

You got it all wrong! Babbel is an app to learn other languages, no punishment of any sort.

Just kidding, it’s an app to make monkey, not to help people.

it’s less that English simplified them and more that it never developed case marks for them.

Well, Old English baggs to differ. English lost its case markings on articles early on and kept them on nouns a while longer while German kept them on articles and simplified nouns much more early on.

In contrast, not only German repurposed the demonstrative “der” (that, which, who) into an article in a cleaner way

… as did English with “se”/“þē” which started as a demonstrative the same way der/die/das did.

but it’s also dumping most grammatical case info into the article

Again, German didn’t dump anything into articles but rather lost it everywhere else.

There is this idea that this fostered the process of using der/die/das much more often (which made it from a demonstrative to an article) but I disagree because it was a widespread process, not only in German but in huge parts of Europe, including beside Romance languages also English were this reasoning doesn’t work (as shown above).

c/nottheonion

From what I know it’s similar in Swiss German (with words like merci and velo (bike)). I don’t know about Fleming but Swiss embraces their dialects so it isn’t stigmatized either

and there are vestiges of a seventh, the Locative.

I called it relicts but it’s basically what I said. Maybe vestiges is the better word in English, in German we say “Relikte”.

So you speak a V2 language like me? I’m German btw. Let me give you an outside perspective on auxiliary verbs in continental western Germanic languages:

The verb comes in second position (hence V2). Using an auxiliary verb moves the content verb to the very end of the sentence. It totally messes with the syntax.

But that’s besides my point. My point wasn’t that French auxiliary verbs are fancy but that fancy can me many things, in French it’s the spelling and pronunciation. Cases aren’t fancy, at least not the German or Latin ones. The slavic cases are a different story, in my objective opinion.

your incorrect assumptions

Why make it about me? I was more or less playing devil’s advocate, saying if not taken seriously it’s funny.

I would be more likely to agree with you if you put “OP’s assumption”. Your phrasing makes me want to double down on my original position.

That’s just a general recommendation for discussions in general, online and offline. I learned a thing or two about my biases and perspectives here. Btw I’m German and that part resonated with me from my little experience with JAVA and my experience in learning about my native language and teaching it to others.

To be clear, in general the vocative is a case eg in Czech and other balto slavic languages (except eg standard Russian while colloquial Russian is developing a new unrelated one).

In Latin tho, it’s more a relict. Other cases have relicts, too, still I wouldn’t say Latin has the locative.

I would argue that being a relict is a spectrum. Technically, it is a case with many syncretism to nominative, since it is obligatory for those nouns. In the context of LAtiN hAs sOo0 ManY cAsES, it’s not.

Sometimes you choose the cat, sometimes the cat chooses you

I don’t disagree but I would still give the benefit of a doubt that “the whole universe” is such an exaggeration that it makes the overstatement obvious. But it would also be read as a praise. Overall, I wouldn’t take it all to seriously. Made me laugh but I also see the eurocentrism and it’s good to be aware of it.

I think the elitism regards of French isn’t about French native speakers but about second language learners. French was the lingua franca in Europe for quite a while and using French loan words makes you sound more fancy and eloquent in many languages (compare “adult” with “grownup” which is a Latin loan word but I can’t think of a real example so I hope no one will notice).

The Russian bit I totally agree. Esperanto vs python is quite a leap, I agree. Showing a list (that’s probably not conclusive but still) is telling when compared to the go to beginners programming language. Still there are parallels in the design and intention. No comparison is ever perfect.

All in all it’s not perfect but as a joke, it works for me. Sure, it’s not unbiased but if not taken too seriously, I can laugh about it, and I can over analyze it for fun so win win for me.

First, I wouldn’t count the vocative but let’s not get into this debate. Counting cases, Russian wins until you include other balto slavic languages or even Uralic ones.

Fancy is a very subjective term. Auxiliary verbs are fancy in their own way. From an orthographical viewpoint, French is quite fancy with all the silent letters, the way vocals are pronounced and stuff. French had like one spelling “reform” and it was like let’s make it more obvious we decent from Latin. Grammar wise it’s just like the other romance languages from what I know. They once got rid of the silent <s> and put a “gravestone” on the letter before (^) that has no other meaning than here was a silent s. Wouldn’t you call that fancy? Who would call it fancy? Mwa Moi!

How so? Except the first sentence which is obviously not serious, I would agree with all linguistic statements or at least not disagree with any.

While sticking to themselves

No, that’s wrong. Zangendeutsch is all about English influence and playfully literal translations even when there are better German words. So you need to translate it back to English and into German again to decode it and that’s the fun about it.

Ich möchte diesen Teppich nicht kaufen. Bitte.

Doch

But there is a lot of “DEUTSCH” in here, so…