Philip Hart wondered aloud to the group: >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? It's different semantic content. The former is possessive, the strength that the army possesses; the latter is an origin, the strength that comes >from the army. The difference isn't very significant, but grammar, so I understand, often makes very big hay out of narrow distinctions. E.g., the rules for which article you choose make astonishingly nit-picky distinctions based on context and noun category that the speaker is only vaguely aware of. One of the most common errors I hear among ESL speakers is the use of "the" where a native speaker would use a null article. Now, it's certainly true that a particular construction can shift from one kind of use to another via reduced inflection and re-analysis. Vowel neutralization in unstressed syllables was a major contributor to an awful lot of inflection collapse in Middle English, driven not so much by laziness as by the interaction of an awful lot of dialects. >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. Not having taken Latin, I would expect to find genitives in noun phrases more than verb phrases; at least, that's where you find most of-phrases in English, de-phrases in French, and no-phrases in Japanese, and those usually fill the same function as the genitive. A strongly-cased language has reduced need for prepositions, because the case incorporates the preposition. That's why Latin wouldn't have an "of". ObDragaeran: Since Fenarian is mostly Magyar and I don't recall Vlad making any comments about Fenarian vis-a-vis Dragaeran, we can presume that Dragaeran is not vastly different from Magyar as human languages go, and Magyar's not particularly strange compared to IE languages despite being wholly unrelated. So we can guess that Dragaeran is probably not tonal and probably not polysynthetic. Given Dragaerans' unusual size, one might expect vocal tones to be generally lower than humans. That will train ears to a lower pitch, which will result in a few things--Vlad will probably perceive human women as being squeaky; Dragaeran operas will have no sopranos, but the altos will be able to blow the back wall off with volume, even without sorcery. Dragaeran will probably also avoid the /i/ phoneme, which will give Dragaerans a pronounced accent when speaking Fenarian. Of course, with an actual practicing linguist on the list, I probably sound like a complete fool. Greg