ABSTRACT
Besides prepositions and postpositions, the only other common way to show a noun's function is with 'case' as in German above, Latin, Russian and Old English (I:me, he:him are remnants of a complete case system). These are like postpositions except that instead of being behind the whole nominal phrase they are generally suffixed on to the nouns and adjectives in the nominal. Worse, for the foreign learner at least, is that they often have different forms for various genders, as well as for nouns and adjectives. This is not necessary, however. Languages such as Finnish, Eskimo, Hungarian and Turkish have easily learned cases.
