Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.esperanto
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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer)
Subject: One point against Esperanto
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Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 00:39:00 GMT
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Not so very long ago, djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) said...

>Well, that was one of the Esperanto criticisms.  IMHO, the number
>agreement was unecessary, but the accusative would have been fine except
>that it was the only thing that had a special noun case.  Ie, 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.

  Similarly, in English, most nouns have their plurals marked with the 
-[e]s ending.  The absence of the plural marking indicates the singular, 
so no specific singular number-marking is necessary, though the 
indefinite article occasionally serves that purpose, so we can tell a 
deer from deer.

-- 
                              ==----=                    Steve MacGregor
                             ([.] [.])                     Phoenix, AZ
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