JK Rowling pens a Harry Potter prequel / War of Roses/Holmes?Figg/Walpurga

[Carol]

> Geoff:
> I'm thinking of Latin, German and Russian which have 6,4 and 7 cases
respectively. I would agree with you that there is often confusion in
the use of "thou" and its various case derivatives.

Carol responds:
As you probably know, English began as a synthetic language
(Anglo-Saxon) which, like Latin, which depended primarily on
morphology (inflected endings) for grammatical meaning but is now
primarily an analytic language, which depends more on word order
(syntax) than morphology. That's why we now have only three cases, as
opposed to five for Anglo-Saxon. 

Geoff: 
> I don't recall ever using case names in English. In addition to
using prepositions as you rightly point out, we do retain some
elements of the old case structure, mainly in personal pronouns. We
/do/ have an equivalent of dative in English; in the phrase "give him
the book", "him" is a dative without a preposition.

Carol:
You're right that we retain cases primarily in pronouns, though nouns
have a possessive form in addition to the form used for subjects and
objects. But what you're calling "dative" is the objective case, used
for direct objects, indirect objects (as in your example, with an
implied "to"), and objects of prepositions. Subjective: he; objective:
him; possessive: his. ("She," "I," "you," and "they" have two
possessive forms each: "her," "hers"; "my," "mine"; "your," "yours";
"their," "theirs," but still only three cases.)
> 
> When I was at school, we studied English grammar in great depth and
had to do clause analysis which very often required us to describe the
function of almost every word in a sentence. <snip>

Carol responds:
Are you referring to diagramming sentences? I had to do that in eighth
grade, but since I already understood the concepts of, say, direct
object, indirect object, and predicate nominative, I don't think it
did me any good. I certainly couldn't diagram a sentence now if I were
asked to do so.

Carol, wondering why she's suffering from allergies when the pollen
count is only moderate