On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: > On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Warlord wrote: > > [...] > > -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, > Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody > a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel > [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.] > > #Southerner: "Mornin'. What're y'all up to?" > #Northerner: "In the civilized north, we do not end sentences in a > #preposition." > #Southerner: *thinks* "So, what're y'all up to, asshole?" > > In Latin you couldn't. In English you can. I agree with the Southerner > here. This part of the text prepared by hand? Anyway, is it the case that this is a hard rule in Latin? The word order is seriously flexible, esp. in poetry. I guess prepositions aren't separable from their nouns and must proceed them, hence no final prepositions - maybe someone can find an exception though in Horace or Vergil. The American Heritage Dictionary comments, Sometimes sentences that end with adverbs, such as "I don't know where she will end up" or "It's the most curious book I've ever run across", are mistakenly thought to end in prepositions. One can tell that "up" and "across" are adverbs here, not prepositions, by the ungrammaticality of "I don't know up where she will end" and "It's the most curious book across which I have ever run". It has never been suggested that it is incorrect to end a sentence with an adverb. Also they say that the preposition rule is Dryden's fault.