robbkvasnak:Maybe for the genative, one could use "-es" so that "la vires domo" would be "the man's house". We already use "-en" that way (Parizen = to Paris). Esperanto already has that nifty "-e" so that "Ŝi diris tion Zamenhofe" = She said it in a Zamenhof way or "like Zamenhof would have said it".

"Parizen" is "Parize" in the accusative case indicating motion towards.

Perhaps "hate" is too strong a word.

However the accusative is an unnecessary complication in a language that claims to be easy.

And before everyone howls "learn the language properly before you dare criticise", I have a simple response, consider me and others like me the voice of the silent majority. The silent majority that hear of the language, look at it, decide "too complicated for a so called easy language" and move on, with you never even knowing of their existence or (albiet short lived) interest.

As for the argument that it works fine the way it is now so don't mess with it, IT DOES NOT WORK FINE THE WAY IT IS NOW, it scares off potential speakers by being unnecessarily complicated and by so doing reduces the chance of gaining wider acceptance.

Bemused:
As for the argument that it works fine the way it is now so don't mess with it, IT DOES NOT WORK FINE THE WAY IT IS NOW, it scares off potential speakers by being unnecessarily complicated and by so doing reduces the chance of gaining wider acceptance.

I’m pretty sure the people who decide not to learn Esperanto because of its linguistic properties are a small minority. Most people who don’t learn it have either never heard of it or think it doesn’t give them any advantage.

darkweasel:I’m pretty sure the people who decide not to learn Esperanto because of its linguistic properties are a small minority. Most people who don’t learn it have either never heard of it or think it doesn’t give them any advantage.

Good point! The accusative case is the basic part of the language and we just can't get rid of it without sacrificing the essential part of esperanto. It gives us a free word order so most of us can express ourselves almost in the same way as we do in our mother tongue. And after all it is too late now, after 120 years of usage, to claim any such reforms to esperanto. So I find all of these claims ridiculous (as in attempts of changing English spelling to phonetic or getting rid of th sound since it is difficult for foreigners - English is considered international nowadays).

It seems to me that -es has escaped to some extent from the textbook correlative table.

'Alies' is quite common and useful. I think I have heard in conversation Kies mantelo estas ĉi tiu? Mies. Perhaps also 'onies'. Anybody else heard that?

But, I have never observed any generalisation to normal lexical roots. It's probably too close to the unstressed -as, -is, -os, and -us. So that 'vires domo' almost seems to be a verbal phrase.

I suppose that French speakers with their 'plume de ma tante' don't feel the need for a germanic genetive.

hebda999:The accusative case is the basic part of the language and we just can't get rid of it without sacrificing the essential part of esperanto. It gives us a free word order so most of us can express ourselves almost in the same way as we do in our mother tongue.

No, it is not. Free word order is a fiction. If a language commonly uses something different from SVO or SOV, it probably has a lot more pecularities to make its rendering into Esperanto completely incomprehensible.

BTW, don't many Polish nouns have the same form in Nom and Acc? Accusative is probably the most useless case, even vocative is mor important.

Tion, mi tute ne komprenas. OSV

Wilhelm:Why do people dislike cases, specifically the accusative?

Here's a possible reason. (Here's a German-language version).

lgg:

hebda999:The accusative case is the basic part of the language and we just can't get rid of it without sacrificing the essential part of esperanto. It gives us a free word order so most of us can express ourselves almost in the same way as we do in our mother tongue.

No, it is not. Free word order is a fiction. If a language commonly uses something different from SVO or SOV, it probably has a lot more pecularities to make its rendering into Esperanto completely incomprehensible.

Really funny. Please, learn esperanto first, make comments later. I don't like to discuss language issues with such ignorant.

Bemused:I have a simple response, consider me and others like me the voice of the silent majority. The silent majority that hear of the language, look at it, decide "too complicated for a so called easy language" and move on, with you never even knowing of their existence or (albiet short lived) interest.

If lernu forums can be believed, then the silent majority also rejects Esperanto because:

- it has a few words like "patro" that specify a certain sex; all words are not default-neutral
- it has accented letters (ŝ, ĉ, etc); an international language should use a more international alphabet, with ASCII letters only
- it has no gender-neutral personal pronoun for people
- it has the -n ending

Ido is grammatically similar to Esperanto and it has "fixed" all of these problems. Every single word of Ido is gender neutral (then a suffix is added to make it masculine or feminine). It has no accented letters. It has a gender-neutral personal pronoun for people. It has no -n ending in the standard word order; it uses an accusative marker only when word order isn't the usual order.

If the grammatical elements I mentioned above are the reasons are the reason why Esperanto hasn't gained more adherents, then why isn't Ido more successful? Could it be that grammatical characteristics are not the primary reason for a language's success or failure?

I sincerely don't have a problem with anyone who wants to speak a language without an accusative ending, or the other grammatical features I mentioned above. That's fine! It's a matter of taste.

But I would rather that people who like those grammatical features go and learn a language like Ido, which already has them. Learn it, use it, enjoy it.

It's not very productive to go to a German forum and complain that German isn't French. Don't go to a German forum and complain that more people would learn German if only it got rid of umlauts and grammatical cases, and added the letter ç. If you like French better than German, then go and learn French!