(leeniea) I think y'all are forgetting that English has two parent tongues, the Germanic and the Latinate.

(Liland) I think it's safe to say the "Latinate", as you put it, is at best a domineering stepparent.

(leeniea) Some of the words you have been calling prepositions are actually Germanic separable prefixes. Examples: "on" in "Turn the light on." "Off" in "He's a show-off." And "up" in "put up with." These are not prepositions, they are adverbs that come late in the sentence.

(Liland) That's true, though I'm not sure they are "actually Germanic separable prefixes". "Are descended from" perhaps, but not "are." "Adverb" is a better term, though still an attempt to make modern English grammar conform to the categories of the grammar of some other, older tongue.

(leeniea) If I change "turn the light on" to "turn on the light" I invoke a vision of a tiny ballerina en pointe, spinning atop a light bulb. Is that what we want to see happening to our mother tongue?

(Liland) Actually, I rather like it. A vision of my mother tongue transformed into a tiny ballerina en pointe... It would certainly remove one of the barriers to the final victory of Esperanto. ;-)

(leeniea) Logically speaking, a true preposition must precede its noun, because it's a "pre-position," a thing which goes in front. Those old scholars weren't so dumb. (Liland) True again, and there are many languages that have, instead, "postpositions" (nothing to do with equestrianism), which equally sensibly follow after the nouns they refer to. Often they are SOV languages (that's Subject-Object-Verb, not Single-Occupancy Vehicle), like Hindi and Japanese. Latin is basically SOV, too, but has more prepositions than post-. Though it does have some post-style items, like the "-cum" in "Pax vobiscum" as well as similarly postpositional conjunctions like the -qve in SPQR (SENATVS POPVLVSQVE ROMANVS).

Incidentally, and quite tangentially, when I was learning Hindi (which is an Indo-European tongue, thus related to English) I found that its word order was so frequently identical to that of Japanese, that if I was trying to adlib a Hindi sentence and needed a vocabulary item I didn't know, I was apt to fill it with the Japanese word, rather than English or Esperanto or something, because in the sentence structure it just "felt right". And since my Hindi professor knew no Japanese it was a bit confusing at times (I wasn't always aware I'd done it....)

Liland