On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Greg Morrow wrote: > 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.) So why the army's strength was sufficient but not the strength of the army's was sufficient Presumably because nouns became less inflected through laziness? Latin doesn't have an "of" if I remember correctly - and there were only a couple of verbs that took the genitive. Ok, and there were some genitives that seemed to be just fancy ways of talking so Cicero wouldn't sound anything like the plebes.