--- Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote: > > > 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. I think you mean that it's natural to lose inflections. English lost inflections but gained word-order grammar. And of course there are forces that add inflections, which is why they exist in the first place. See the sci.lang FAQ <http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sci-lang-faq/>, section 30. Jerry Friedman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/