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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Stefano MacGregor)
Subject: One point against Esperanto
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Date: Sun, 19 Mar 1995 07:17:16 GMT
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Lastatempe skribis djohnson@arnold.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) jene:
>No, there are more than two cases.  For instance, there are 4 cases in
>"the boy in the yard hit the ball with the stick".  The other cases
>are distinguished by particles.
>
>(of course, in Esperanto, because it is regular, one can treat the
>accusative case as an example of an "n" particle that comes after the
>noun, as opposed to a preposition that comes before)

  How many cases there are in a language can depend on whose description 
of the language is used.  In English, you could get away with the above 
multiple-case description.  My description lists only three cases, and 
two of those have identical forms for all nouns and some pronouns.  But I 
say that there are six tenses of verbs.  Someone else, I see, uses the 
same logic in describing verbs as I use in describing nouns, and thus 
claims that there are only two tenses.
  Esperanto, however, has a =prescriptive= grammar; that is, the grammar 
came first, and the language follows it.  Zamenhof says that there are 
two cases, and thus there are only two:  nominative and accusative.  
Placing a preposition in front of a noun in one of these cases does not 
create another case; it simply creates a prepositional phrase with the 
object in either the nominative or accusative, according to the grammar 
prescription.
  It may very well be that someone else, in seeing the language but not 
the grammar, will call things by different names.  As a point of fact, I 
see a defective instrumental case (a noun root, with an adverbial "-e" 
suffix), but describing the language this way has no real advantage over 
the prescriptive grammar, which calls the form a derived adverb.

[this reply is not cross-posted to <soc.culture.esperanto>, due to its 
inappropriate language]
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