German has those horrible Fälle and Kasus-Fallendungen

It's interesting how the older German grammatical traditon translated these Graeco-Latin grammatical terms into German. Greek πτωσις (ptōsis) meant literally 'falling, fall'. The romans translated this as casus (< cadō 'to fall'), and the Germans carried on the tradition with Fall. The idea was that the nominative case was normal and the oblique cases fell away from that. In older grammars, this is called accidence. English got rid of its cases and so did all the Romance languages, but the Slavic languages held on tight to theirs. It's not really a question of simplifying the language but making it complicated in different ways. wink

Ceci n'est pas un seing.