Re: Official German spelling update

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:

|"viel" (or the Middle High German vil) was originally used as
|a noun that entailed a partitive genitive. As you can see

  The omission of the partitive is akin a bit to when the "of"
  is dropped in "a couple friends." Compare that also to German:
  "eine Art von Zahlwort" -> "eine Art Zahlwort".