Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!bt!btnet!peernews.demon.co.uk!storcomp.demon.co.uk!philip
Subject: Re: One point against Esperanto
References: <D5ICH0.Ho1@indirect.com> <D61nCy.LGL@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
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Date: Mon, 27 Mar 1995 01:10:40 +0000
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In article <D61nCy.LGL@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
           iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk "Ivan A Derzhanski" writes:
> >  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,

Doesn't Farsi also have this feature?

> and
> this is somehow registered by people's innate grammar unit and makes
> them feel that something is wrong with such a language.

-- 
Phil Hunt...philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk
"on no pos fac omelet, opcum brekization ovums"
