Philip Hart wondered aloud to the group:
>) - last night I had to break it to some otherwise very fluent friends
>that "a colleague of us" isn't English. Why is "ours" necessary here?
"of X" is here used in a possessive sense and hence X takes the possessive
case--it's not just "of ours", it's "of mine", "of yours", and "of Joe's".
In a strongly-cased language like Latin or German, it'd be the genitive
case, but English is only very very weakly cased. For example, "of X" used
to indicate origin or content would also be genitive case in many cased
languages, but in English it's plain: "lady of Spain". (In the rare
construction that sticks a pronoun in there, the pronoun would be in
objective case.)
As for Dragaeran, do we know anything about its grammar or structure other
than it has a third-person singular neuter pronoun? Since Dragaerans
derive from human stock, we can hypothesize that Dragaeran is built with
human language universals. We also observe it (via the changing style of
translation) evolving rapidly (relative to lifetime) from pre-Interregnum
to post-Interregnum, exactly as we'd expect a human language to
evolve. And if that evolution resembles other rapid evolution events on
Earth, post-Interregnum Dragaeran probably has simpler grammar--fewer
cases, tenses, moods, less agreement, less synthetic, less tonal--and more
dependence on word order than pre-Interregnum Dragaeran. Possibly also
more phonemes.
--
"Supposedly, it is possible to score goals [in field hockey]. However, this
rarely happens because hitting people is so positively reinforcing."
--Prof. Ralph Noble
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