Bemused:
Could someone please explain where this "accusative" is found in English, and how it works in English.

The term "accusative" is from traditional Latin and Greek grammar, where nouns have different endings for different grammatical roles.

In English, we have a kind of accusative in the 1st and 3rd person pronouns, but not the 2nd person.

You can "I see him" but not "I see he". "Him" is the accusative form of "he". You can say "He saw me" but not "He saw I"; "Me" is the accusative form of "I". In English we also have a genitive case, used to indicate possession. The regular formation of the genitive is 'S, as in "My brother's violin." With pronouns, the genitive/possessive form is irregular: "I" becomes "my".

It's perfectly possible to learn Esperanto, or any other language, without learning this grammatical terminology, and it's probably preferable to do so. But one way or another the underlying structures have to be grasped. PMEG has moved away from using grammatical jargon, and talks about "-N vortoj" and "-A vortoj" instead of "accusative" and "adjective", mostly.

antoniomoya:
Although the accusative may exist in natural languages, I see no reason why Zamenhof had to introduce this added difficulty in his constructed language. Simply, I do not understand.

You're assuming, in calling it an "added difficulty," that Esperanto would be easier without the accusative. The point I'm arguing is that this isn't necessarily so. A version of Esperanto without -N could be made to work, certainly, but that doesn't mean it would be easier. Other complications and restrictions would have to be introduced to compensate for the removal of -N.

T0dd:
Well, I wish they'd get rid of the rule in Spanish where you have to use 'a' before a direct object only if it's a person. That drives me crazy!

Interestingly, this article defending the Esperanto n-form ...

http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/akuzativo.html

... argues that some languages, including Spanish with the "a personal" you mentioned, have redeveloped accusative markers after having lost them from their parent languages (Latin in the case of Spanish and Romanian, Dutch in the case of Afrikaans). The point being that losing case markers is not necessarily a one-way natural thing for languages to do.

You're right that it's easy for an L2-Spanish-speaker to forget, though.

I should correct myself. Most major languages do not use an accusative in a way as thorough as Esperanto. English, German Spanish, Hindi and Mandarin do not make frequent use of the accusative and the meaning of the sentence is not dependent on it, in most cases. I know that German certainly uses it, but only with masculine nouns. Anyway I'm fond of the accusative. I just think that people make mistakes with it because they are often not used to depending on it for meaning in a sentence, and it can be very tempting to drop it in favor of word order. I think that the case is useful though because it adds flexibility.

I personally find the ojn ending a bit ann(oy)ing. Many words sound fine with it, and many sound better with the oj ending. However the sound of words lose their peculiarity as one becomes used to using them.

Ganove:
I did some research about that in the internet. I read that some children growing up with Esperanto drop the accusative marker "n" at object nouns and tend to use subject-verb-object constructions. [Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto, Benjamin K. Bergen] This behaviour is explained as a nativization process of Esperanto based on the children's other native language. An other theory is that Esperanto experiences a similar creolization prozess if it is a native language as it was observed in other creol languages.

But if the other native language does have such object-marking construction e.g. Finish the children also use such construction in Esperanto. [Native Esperanto as a Test Case for Natural Language, Jouko Lindstedt]

I think that it could be possible that some Esperanto construction could contain too much morphological redudancy, anyhow, I don't want to change Esperanto and even if I wanted I couldn't do so.

Nevertheless, I am interested in your opinions about that.

A big point to me is that the accustive is already largely dropped in one particular case: proper nouns.

There are a few ideas of how to deal with it, but in general people seem to not care if you put the accusitive or not on a proper noun.

The phonetics of esperanto is an interesting topic too, but I don't have a lot of information on hand right now.

Hundies19:Anyway I'm fond of the accusative. I just think that people make mistakes with it because they are often not used to depending on it for meaning in a sentence, and it can be very tempting to drop it in favor of word order. I think that the case is useful though because it adds flexibility.

Agreed. People will tend to use whatever word order they are comfortable with from their native language, and -N lets them do that, to a great extent.

In English, I'd say "I know that I know nothing." In Esperanto I would say Mi scias ke mi scias nenion. A native German speaker might be inclined to say Mi scias ke mi nenion scias. The latter might feel more natural, and -N lets him or her do it.

I don't mind -OJN at all. In the early days of Esperanto, Western European intellectuals complained about the "slavicism" of these -AJ and -OJ formations. I rather like them. They keep Esperanto from sounding like a bland pan-Romance language. The same goes for the -AŬ words.

erinja:Todd, you also forgot to mention that most people decide not to learn Esperanto never even being aware that the -n ending exists; and of the people who start learning and stop, we don't actually know that "It isn't easy enough due to the -n ending" is the reason (and if this is really the case, then why don't all of the constructed languages without an accusative ending enjoy much greater success than Esperanto?)

I suspect that one reason for people dropping it after starting is that they started in the first place because of the hype of Esperantists themselves about the ease of learning getting exaggerated into "instantaneous recognition" a la Interlingua for speakers of Romance languages, and they discover it isn't and give up in disgust and distrust.

erinja:I don't happen to agree that native speakers of Esperanto just can't get -n. I haven't read the study but the native speaker population is quite small and I have the impression that the study must have necessarily been so small that its results were likely without statistical significance. If you want to play that game, then most native Esperanto speakers I've met speak Esperanto correctly with -n, so does that mean that my anecdotal evidence 'beats' the study's anecdotal evidence? Incidentally, loads of 'natural' languages have an equivalent of the -n ending (which is in many cases more complicated than the way Esperanto does it), and I don't see their native speakers dropping it. Obviously it doesn't present anything particularly alien or difficult to the human brain.

I wonder if the native speakers who drop the -n aren't all children of non-accusative language speakers who learned it from a book or class.

Any conclusions drawn from research on the Esperanto of native speakers as to the likely development of Esperanto are going to be dubious for at least 3 reasons

1. Denaskuloj are now and forever likely to be only a tiny proportion of the portantoj of the language.

2. There is no guarantee that the Esperanto of the parents was good.

3. The exposure of children to Esperanto in a family environment cannot be compared with the experience of children growing up in a country where a particular national language is spoken.

kefga_x:A big point to me is that the accustive is already largely dropped in one particular case: proper nouns.

It isn't that it's dropped on proper nouns. It's that when the word can't accept it (because it is a foreign word that can't take an Esperanto ending), it isn't used.

So we would say "Mi vizitis Parizon" (proper noun in Esperanto form), but if we use a name of a city that doesn't have a translation in Esperanto, we would say "Mi vizitis Rockville" (no -n, foreign word)

The same thing with names - Mi vidas Johanon (assimilated name, -n), but Mi vidas Xiao-lan (unassimilated name, no -n)

Those are the grammatical requirements.

What is perhaps confusing to you is that in written language some people tack on an -n to an unassimilated word; they would write something like "Mi vizitis Rockville-n", "Mi vidas Xiao-lan-n", etc. That isn't necessary and I would go so far to say it isn't advisable. But it isn't a wholesale dropping of -n on proper nouns. It's a practice of not forcing Esperanto grammar into a hole it doesn't fit into (foreign words). I would venture to say that you'd do the same thing with *any* foreign word in Esperanto, proper noun or not. So if I were ordering in Esperanto at an Ethiopian restaurant, I might tell the waiter "Mi volas kika wot, mi petas" (no -n for the foreign word). I could, however, translate it and say "Mi volas pizan kaĉon, mi petas" and use -n normally, or assimilate the foreign word and say "Mi volas kika-vaton, mi petas" (-n for the assimilated word)

It might be slightly different when asking someone to pass the injera. Injera ends in a vowel so it can accept -n more easily; I would likely say "Pasu la injeran, mi petas". But I could also assimilate it and say "Pasu la inĝeron, mi petas".

erinja:

kefga_x:A big point to me is that the accustive is already largely dropped in one particular case: proper nouns.

It isn't that it's dropped on proper nouns. It's that when the a word can't accept it (because it is a foreign word that can't take an Esperanto ending), it isn't used.

So we would say "Mi vizitis Parizon" (proper noun in Esperanto form), but if we use a name of a city that doesn't have a translation in Esperanto, we would say "Mi vizitis Rockville" (no -n, foreign word)

[/quote]Sometimes people add -ON, instead of just -N, to proper nouns such as "Rockville". Mi vizitis Rockville-on. Others find this too jarring. To me, it's no more jarring than adding the English 's to foreign names and words. "I liked Humberto Eco's book," etc.