German has those horrible Fälle and Kasus-FallendungenIt'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.
