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From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Subject: Re: One point against Esperanto
Message-ID: <D61nCy.LGL@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <D5ICH0.Ho1@indirect.com>
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 1995 10:48:31 GMT
Lines: 24

In article <D5ICH0.Ho1@indirect.com> stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer) writes:
>Not so very long ago, djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) said...
>>Well, that was one of the Esperanto criticisms.  [...] why does
>>a direct object take a special suffix, but no other noun cases? 
>
>  Because the other case is marked perfectly well by the =absence= of the 
>accusative case-marking.

This misses the point.  The question is not why the nominative
is unmarked, but why the accusative is the only oblique case.

Note that in Esperanto prepositions govern the nominative, and that
doesn't seem to be the case in any language which has oblique cases.
(Counterexamples welcome.  Hungarian and Turkish won't do, I think:
their `case suffixes' are hardly different from postpositions.)  I
suspect that Esperanto is typologically unique in this respect, and
this is somehow registered by people's innate grammar unit and makes
them feel that something is wrong with such a language.

-- 
`"Na, na ... ah mean, *no wey*, wi aw due respect, ma lady," stammers Joe.'
Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk)    (J Stuart, _Auld Testament Tales_)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,   Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House E113, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Pk Rd, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
