Talk:Partitive case

what about French? I remember studying an "article partitif". "J'ai des bouteilles de vin," I have some bottles of wine. "des" is a contraction of "de" + "les", "de" being "of" and "les" being plural for "the". The use of "des" as opposed to simply "les" is to identify this as a partitive case, I think... because "J'ai les bouteilles de vin" would mean you had all the bottles of wine in the world. Someone with more knowledge than I, please contribute? glasperlenspiel 03:17, 4 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're right about it, except that it's not a partitive case (since there aren't cases in French) but a partitive function expressed by other means, see Partitive. Adam78 12:38, 4 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hello everyone! I think it'd be great if we created a site devoted to declension and conjugation in various languages, where a script, linked to a database, would generate the appropriate forms, depending on the input. What do you think? Petusek

Such systems are very complex. An encyclopedia isn't the right platform. --Vuo 17:58, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A kind of such site already exists, see Verbix. Adam78 19:18, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for this! The partitive makes Finnish difficult to speak accurately and I never before understood what it really meant. My big frustration with learning languages is the absence of layman's definitions of grammar. Ian —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ir5ac (talk • contribs) 08:31, 10 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed some stuff in the section on Finnish. The parts about having things ("onko teillä kirjat?") mistakenly referred to the accusative case, even though in the possessive constructs in Finnish, the thing being possessed is in the nominative, because it is actually the grammatical subject of the sentence. --Zet 08:16, 8 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In English language, it's a bit unusual to use "to contain" for food or the like. You would rather say "there is milk in the glass" than "the glass contains milk". However, in scientific use I would prefer contain. "As you can see, the glass contains a viscous liquid, whose surface tension will halve once we add some acid to it ..." -andy 92.229.65.206 (talk) 03:57, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]