On Apr 6, 2004, at 2:48 PM, Philip Hart wrote: > > > 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. > Let's keep it clean here. All this talk of genitives could get Ashcroft worried about us...