Fmawno

[Prrton]

But what about what we have so far, ma Wm., makes the encliticized post-positions the innovation. Couldn't a complex case system be 'deteriorating' (morphing) into "adpositions"? It's happened before.

In what languages?  Case endings tend to evaporate away, if anything, not become unmoored and float around.  Postpostion -> case ending is much, much more common.

True they don't float around and in the (English) example I was thinking of they didn't float around, they did "evaporate" and were replaced by other (new) words.

I can see the "reality" being all kinds of different things, but regardless of the backstory, it still SEEMS/FEELS English-y to me that they might travel so far away from their nouns.

Aah, but they don't go with nouns — they go with the noun phrase, which can be a much bigger thing.  In Japanese, the relationals will always come after the noun because any modifiers in a noun phrase will come before the noun.

Correct. Japanese noun modifiers do only come before the nouns. I only gave Japanese as an example of why I feel the way I do about the "floating" adpositions in Na'vi. But, it is precisely because they modify the noun phrase that the question arises as to the possibility of their floating in the other direction... past the 'tail' of «ayram alusìng». That question is begged also by the question "How does (may) one say 'at that big gray floating mountain where my ikran died'"?

   ro sawla sì ngula sì tolerkup tsatseng(ro) ikran oeyä a [tsaram alusìng] ?

   tsawla sì ngula [tsaramro alusìng] (sì?) a tolerkup ro satseng ikran oeyä ?

   tsawl(a) ngulsìa [tsaramro alusìng] a tolerkup ro satseng ikran oeyä ?

How "closely attached" is that «alusìng» to «ram» and how much does it "tie up and paralyze" the space following the noun phrase?

I don't know. That's where my question comes from. And because we have -a--influenced "stacking constraints" (shall we call them?), I do feel it's convenient to be able to have the adpositions "float" toward the front of the noun phrases.

Of course, in a theoretical construct that "convenience" could have evolved over many many generations, but your proposal that the case marking "pull" encliticizes the adpositions makes a great deal of sense.