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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer)
Subject: One point against Esperanto
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Date: Mon, 27 Mar 1995 10:58:07 GMT
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Not so very long ago, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) said...

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

  Well, Esperanto has only two case, so only one of them needs to be 
oblique.
  English has three cases, but for nouns, two of them are always 
identical.  Now, as I =see= the Romance languages, they have only two 
cases, using a preposition where English sometimes uses the possessive 
case (sometimes called genitive), but for nouns, these two cases have 
identical forms.
  Esperanto nouns and pronouns function pretty much like Romance nouns in 
general, except that the two cases =are= marked (by having one of them 
end with the suffix "-n").

>Note that in Esperanto prepositions govern the nominative, and that
>doesn't seem to be the case in any language which has oblique cases.

  True.  Esperanto has a somewhat "a posteriori" grammar.
  It would have been possible to have Esperanto prepositions govern the 
accusative (like the Romance languages, or like Latin prepositions 
governing the ablative), but the distinctions between "in" and "into", 
"on" and "onto", and the like are handy, so Esperanto has a choice of 
cases that some prepositions can govern.  Instead of taking the usual 
case (whatever that may be), they take the accusative to show motion 
toward a position, rather than location in a position.  (Latin, Greek, 
and German do this, too, but there are some prepositions that take =only= 
certain cases.)  In Esperanto, the only case =other= than the accusative 
is the nominative, so that is the "usual case" I mentioned above.
  Some recent constructed languages have no case-marking.  That works.  
All it means is that you need some means other than case-ending to tell 
the subject of a sentence from the direct object.  Word-order (as in 
English) is one way.  Use of declinative particles (as in Japanese) is 
another way.  Esperanto has =a= way to make this distinction, and that's 
all that's necessary; it is not necessary that Esperanto's way be the 
same as that of some other language.  It's simple, and it works.

-- 
                              ==----=                    Steve MacGregor
                             ([.] [.])                     Phoenix, AZ
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        Help stamp out, eliminate, and abolish redundancy!
