On 5 Feb 2002, Cees de Groot wrote:

> Hannes Hirzel <hirzel at spw.unizh.ch> said:
> >| Ellipse's |  width |
> >
> >  vs.
> >
> >| the width  |  of the Ellipse |
> >
> Because these sentences are incomplete, it's hardly an issue with SVO but
> rather with the genitive being present/in common use, not? At least, I cannot
> discern a verb here...

Obviously I did not give enough details:
Actually I wanted to say that word order is important. In the general
simple phrase
Subject - verb - object (for example in English, Dutch, German)

_and_ in the noun phrase, e.g. associative or genetive construction.

These two constructions are of particular importance in an artificial
command language like etoys and your remark on the problems you faced when
translating the etoys vocabulary to Dutch confirms this. You even called
it a "showstopper".

 
> In Dutch, the second form is definitely more natural than the first form
> (and I think that's where I stopped half a year ago when assessing
> the work involved in translating eToys to Dutch - word order was a sort
> of showstopper for the easy path of just offering alternate string
> dictionaries). De first form is possible, but hasn't been fashionable
> for the last half century at least, as we are slowly moving away from
> dependency on case in our language (IIRC, this was mostly introduced 
> during Classicism, because it was a neat idea from Latin - the same would
> hold for German, we've just been quicker to get rid of it ;-))).
> 
> In German, both forms would be possible and written using the genitive, but
> the first form would probably be considered oldfashioned (or poetic at least). 
> 
> Going down in the quality of my language knowledge, I'd say that the
> second form is more natural in French, Italian and Spanish as well
> (is the first form possible at all in the Roman languages?).

In French only the second form is possible as far as I know. I don't know
how it is in Italian and Spanish

Regards
Hannes Hirzel