Tahnks for a very interesting discussion, jheem and Fong. I was struck by the fact that Latin, like Hindi, has no articles. As I come to grip with postpositions, however, it seems that word order in Hindi DOES matter, despite nouns and adjectives being governed by case. The simplest example in my coursebook is this:

mez par qalam hai - table on pen is.

Which would be used to answer the question:
mez par kyaa hai? - What's on the table?

vs
qalam mez par hai - pen table on is.

Which would be used to answer the question:
qalam kahaaN hai? - Where's the pen?

This word order and use of (Hindi) postpositions can be seen very clearly in Hinglish as well.

Jheem, could the Hindi dependence on word order be connected to its having fewer distinguishing case markers than Latin?


noho ora mai
http://maxqnzs.com/References.html