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Why do people hate grammatical cases?

by Wilhelm, January 7, 2012

Messages: 115

Language: English

Wilhelm (User's profile) January 7, 2012, 11:22:34 PM

I always hear people complaining about and even wanting to eliminate the accusative case in Esperanto.

Why do people dislike cases, specifically the accusative?

Personally, I love the accusative.
If anything, I would want to add additional cases, specifically the genitive case in order to eliminate long strings of "x de x de x de x"
(It would have the additional benefit of being backward compatible, unlike the elimination of the accusative)

Hispanio (User's profile) January 7, 2012, 11:32:08 PM

I love grammatical cases, but only if they don't change the word stem.

Personally I found the accusative difficult long time ago, but now I don't complain rideto.gif

darkweasel (User's profile) January 7, 2012, 11:49:30 PM

The reason is quite simple: they are mostly speakers of languages without explicit case marking (like English) and they think if their native language doesn’t have it, an "easy" language doesn’t need it either.

BTW, a similar Esperanto thread is located here (though it’s mostly offtopic): Kial akuzativo estas konsiderata ofte malbonaĵo en E-o?

robbkvasnak (User's profile) January 8, 2012, 12:12:27 AM

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".

Hispanio (User's profile) January 8, 2012, 12:15:07 AM

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".
In fact, there is a suffix in Esperanto which works in that way: ties, kies, ies...

darkweasel (User's profile) January 8, 2012, 12:15:14 AM

robbkvasnak:Maybe for the genative, one could use "-es" so that "la vires domo" would be "the man's house".
One could, if that were in any way part of Esperanto.

Wilhelm (User's profile) January 8, 2012, 12:26:52 AM

Wilhelm:
If anything, I would want to add additional cases...
BTW, I'm not actually advocating any changes to Esperanto, it was just for the sake of discussion.

razlem (User's profile) January 8, 2012, 12:27:34 AM

I don't think people hate them, they just don't understand the uses. What gets me is that the accusative is such a specific element to have in a language like Esperanto, and to not have additional cases such as dative or genitive (which, I think, allow for even greater expression and word order freedom). I.E., if you're not going to include others, why have it at all?

But meh. The language has already evolved around the usage of the accusative, and it's probably best to leave it that way for the sake of stability.

I get a dollar for each time "it works fine the way it is now" (or any variation thereof) is typed. senkulpa.gif rido.gif

tommjames (User's profile) January 8, 2012, 12:37:26 AM

robbkvasnak:Maybe for the genative, one could use "-es" so that "la vires domo" would be "the man's house".
Alas the correlatives are a "closed system", meaning that (with a few exceptions) it is not considered valid to mix their elements with other parts of the language. "La vires domo" would just be taken as an error.

I wouldn't mind a genetive case though, and I've always found appealing the theoretical prospect of using -es for it. But perhaps that's just because I'm an English speaker.

lgg (User's profile) January 8, 2012, 4:28:27 AM

Because accusative looks wrong and weird being the only flective case; all other cases like genitive, dative, instrumentalis, partitive, ergative, etc. are analitical. They just don't mix.

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