>>But this is the usage of "what" to mean quality, not identity or definition. "what am I again?" - "you're mad". I brought this up because last time we discussed this someone (you, Alan or someone else) pointed out that that usage is simply not in use, or something to that effect. So, my question is - does this usage of "what" fall under regular ones, or is it just... the workaround for the lack of word which would mean "kakav"?
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>You've proved over the years that Serbian is rich in pedantic words for every occasion, and yes, although exhibiting a paucity of expressions in comparison, we manage to get by in English. Yes, we haven't a word for "what" in every case.

That's clear... I've found hundreds of missing words (or rather, found hundreds missing...because they wouldn't be missing if they were found... or should we take "missing" as in "Cheney is a missing person"). Look at http://www.ndragan.com/lange/textless.html for words completely missing, and http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/brezbesed.html for a list of words for which we have separate words for each meaning (the latter one is in Serbian - would need to write a lot of text to explain different meanings).

My question was whether the usage as in the example I found was correct or not.

>What bugs me is when people say "Petrol is dearer than what it was a year ago". Totally unnecessary use of "what" and grammatically sooooo incorrect .

A single word for "how much" would do nicely there. I guess that whoever coined this phrase wanted to achieve that - which would be just redundant, but not incorrect. Actually, what's the proper way to say this (apart from the obvious move to remove "what")?

>Then again, think of the Latin dative and ablative cases: in, towards, at, away from, above, below, etc. yet the Romans worked out - from the CONTEXT - which was meant. :-)

The languages with cases (see the list of cases in the previous message :) rely on the context for special cases only, not as a rule. The combination of case plus adverb covers numerous situations, and also cuts out the words you need to add to create context or avoid ambiguity.

This just reminds me of a dispute I had with Doug Dodge years ago. At some point, he asked me "how do you, then, ...", to which I answered with a long paragraph. There he found I was selfish because I have inserted "I" a dozen times. Well, that's English, I can't say what I do without the pronoun. In Slavic languages, Latin and Hungarian (and probably many others) you can write pages without a pronoun. Because the person is implied in the verb.