[wcarey]

That particular sentence is a really tough knot pedagogically too. As a teacher, you want a short simple sentence that includes a nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and verb to habituate students to thinking about cases.

Unfortunately, in the first declension, the nominative plural, genitive singular, and and dative singular all look identical, hence the confusion here. Filiae and agricolae could be any of those three options, which means, as you rightly say, that we need context to render the sentence. That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar.

If you wanted to separate the introduction of the case system from the introduction of the context sensitivity of the grammar, you could do this sentence:

> Filiabus aquam agricolae dant.

While that fixes most of the context sensitivity, it doesn't fix all of it, and introduces an irregular declension, also tough right out the gate.

Latin is a hard language to teach.

[hakuseki]

Actually this is an example of ambiguity, not context sensitivity (in the formal languages sense). Context sensitivity means context is needed to construct a grammatical sentence, not merely to parse one. It's actually pretty hard to find examples of this in natural language.

[thaumasiotes]

Judging by the paper linked sidethread, it's enough that some valid sentences cannot be constructed in a context-free way. Even if they can be losslessly transformed into alternative sentences which can be easily derived from a context-free grammar, their existence demonstrates that the language is not context-free.

[andrepd]

> That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar.

Surely this is a feature of all languages :)

[Tomte]

Certainly not.

The first example of context-sensitive constructions in natural language was found in 1985.

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85...