On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Jerry Friedman wrote: > --- Greg Morrow <dr.elmo at whiterose.org> wrote: > > 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? > > Hm. Are speakers of English lazier than speakers of Russian or, > for that matter, Hungarian? (I think Hungarian has lots of noun > inflections--but I've been wrong before.) I think so - it's natural to lose grammar (compare Horace's Latin to the demotic) but of course there are forces that maintain it. > Also, since we mostly don't have cases in English, we have to be > careful about things like word order. Is that less lazy? Judging from Latin, where near-random word order makes life hard (for this native English speaker), yes.