> It is quite revealing that all romance languages spawned by Latin lost the case system at some point.
And gained articles and fixed order of words instead.
Also, not all languages have lost it - German retains quite a bit of Latin gender system and somewhat reduced case system.
>Having a full degree of freedom in such a basic mechanism of grammar does not make it easy for speakers of highly positional languages.
I come from the other direction - fixed order of words is not such a big deal.
Posted Dec 20, 2012 23:13 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
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German is not a romance language, and proud of it. You could make the case with English due to much influence from Latin and French, but English people would not appreciate it.