Well, this certainly exploded... ;D

A lot of what has been said was tracing after where my own thoughts were going, and beyond.

The Verb+Object+Modifier idea is very good, close to what I was trying to come up with.

The Nonlethal/Lethal idea of Rei_Jin...nice, and does help capture the flavor of the source material I'm drawing inspiration from (a tad of [i]Eragon[/]'s magic language, flavored with the Speech of the Young Wizards series, with some general True Name concepts thrown in and vigorously shaken.

As for Ars_Magica...I've heard of it. I've also heard that it's ridiculously broken in favor of magic-users, I don't want to have fighters/barbarians/whatever other classes I design to fall by the wayside.

Sir_Glebidiah really hit the nail on the head - that's the balance I need to find. I picture the meleeist/tank characters protecting the mage from actual physical harm, so he can spend more HP on spells. In the case of opposing mages, they'll just batter each other in a 'mageduel' of sorts till one collapses from magical stress or actual damage.

Rei_Jin's ideas of applying modifiers are excellent again. I did think of "tiered" words, for example, the chain that deals Fire damage:
Singe...um, say, 1d4/level
Scorch...eh, 1d6/level
Burn....1d8/level
Char.....1d10/level
Immolate....1d12/level

And their equivalencies for ice damage/electrical damage, and so on. The specific tier of the VERB would determine its effect, and the OBJECT would give it a target - without an OBJECT, the spell would either fail due to unclear instructions, or backlash at a random target. MODIFIERS, like Empower or Long Range, could alter the form of the spell.

For spell preparation, pure spontaneous casting was an option. However, I did think it might be a more effective limiter to make them prepare their spells ahead of time, or at least, the framework of such - this is borrowed from the Young Wizards mythology, where spells need to be built up beforehand, then can sit unused and memorized until the final variable is inserted (a standard action!) and released. Altering an existing variable - say, changing Freeze to Burn to deal with a randomly encountered troll - would take longer, a full-round action maybe, or changing Wolf to Orc if the need arose. Altering more complex tiers of WORDS would take more time. There wouldn't be a limit on spell frameworks "readied", or maybe something simple like 2x caster level. but preparing it ahead of time would take time. This would reward more general WORDS, since they would need to be swapped out less frequently and thus occupy less "slots".

Also, researching Words is good, but some words could be unresearchable for some reason, lost or hidden long ago and forgotten. This would definitely give mages an incentive to adventure, exploring dark caves and underground dungeons in search of powerful, never-before-seen WORDS. Most Ancient/Mighty words and a new of the Major/Greater words would probably require this...though it wouldn't be common - more like a story award, it'd be a nice surprise for a Mage to find a tattered grimoire containing a long-forgotten phrase for some powerful MODIFIER, like Maximize or Persist, while his fighter buddies are cavorting with their new swords over the dragon carcass.