Roberto12:I remember a few years ago seeing a conlang that someone had made that was billed as the fictitious ancestor language of Esperanto.

Arcaicam_Esperantom (en)
Arcaicam_Esperantom (eo)

Ah yes, that's it.

My pleasure, exaos.

MoutOp:Yes, in Italian the personal pronoun isn't required. But, if it's used, it emphasizes the actant. If I say "Io amo ti", I don't say "I love you", but "Me, I love you". In Eo, as in French or English, the personal pronoun is required.

But English speakers do say "love you" and in certain circumstances it is perfectly understandable.

If your partner was rushing out the door to work you might call out "Love you!" and it is unlikely to leave him/her confused about who or what loves.

Was this question only about proper grammar?

黄鸡蛋:I sometimes used it, but only when there was no possibility to misunderstand. Esperanto is not Japanese, where a single word "love" can mean I love you.

You are right 黄鸡蛋, in Japanese to love, ,(I) love, (he) loves is rendered by the same single word. But if you want to be clear, you have to put before something like watashi wa, boku wa, which means as far as I am concerned. This is not a grammatical subject but clearly indicates who loves.

I don't understand how people can say that "vin amas" is bad Esperanto. It doesn't specify that I am the person that love you but unless you were talking about not feeling loved by anyone and you mean to say "you are loved", I would interpret it as I love you.

Aaron94:I don't understand how people can say that "vin amas" is bad Esperanto. It doesn't specify that I am the person that love you but unless you were talking about not feeling loved by anyone and you mean to say "you are loved", I would interpret it as I love you.

The difficulty is that, since Esperanto aims to be international, sentences should be as unambiguous and clear as possible. "Love you" is idiomatic in its structure, and even though English speakers would have no trouble understanding who the omitted subject is, it's probably not obvious for a speaker of, say, Chinese. Making sure that all parts of speech are present reduces the chance of misunderstanding.

Therein, I think, is Esperanto's greatest disadvantage -- the loss of idioms. But that's probably inevitable, given EO's goal of intercultural comprehension.

(Oh, and take all of this with a grain of salt. I can be quite pedantic about grammar at times. )

Aaron94:I don't understand how people can say that "vin amas" is bad Esperanto. It doesn't specify that I am the person that love you but unless you were talking about not feeling loved by anyone and you mean to say "you are loved", I would interpret it as I love you.

"You are loved" is the passive voice, which is a different verb form that emphasizes the result and not the agent. The Esperanto equivalent of that would be "Vi estas amata", and not "vin amas" (or "amas vin" )

It's hard to give you an equivalent of what "vin amas" would sound like in English, because even "love you" gives you more information - English conjugates its verbs (even though it's only on a very basic level). So for example, "love you" can only possibly mean "I love you" or "You love you" (which doesn't make sense - it would have to be "You love yourself" to be grammatical), or "They love you", or "We love you". It could not possibly be "He loves you", "She loves you", "It loves you", or "John loves you", because those use a different verb form, obviously. "Love you" would never be a short form of "John loves you".

And obviously, as it has already been mentioned, "ti amo" in Italian is a totally different situation, because "amo" already includes all information about the subject - "io ti amo" could be construed as redundant, because we're giving information about the subject twice (in "io" and in -o). Incidentally, Italian is less flexible about leaving out subject pronouns when the verb form doesn't make the subject clear. When the verb doesn't show the subject clearly, such as singular subjunctive verbs, (like how Esperanto verbs don't show the subject at all!), the subject pronoun is typically included, even in Italian (because otherwise it could be I, you, he, she, or it who does the action).

It's bad Esperanto because you can't just leave out a word in a sentence, just because you can do that in another language. Each language has situations where it's ok in informal speech to leave out a certain word, and the rest is understood through context - and also situations where it is not ok to leave out a word, even though the listener could likely puzzle it out.

For example, many languages don't use "is" in a simple sentence like "A [is or are] B". In Russian, you would say something like "I student" to mean "I am a student". You can't say "I student" in English, even though you would be understood, and you couldn't say "Mi studento" in Esperanto for the same reason. Even though you do it in normal Russian, you can't do it in English or Esperanto.

In the opposite direction, in Esperanto it is normal to say "Venu kaj manĝu ĉe mi" - Come and eat at me. In English, we have to say "At my house" or "At my place" to make it grammatical, we can't simply say "at me" (though certain dialects of English have an equivalent of this construction). So just because you can do it in Esperanto, doesn't mean you can do it in normal English.

I realize that it takes a little time to figure out what you can and can't leave out in informal speech in any language. It isn't regular across languages. I encourage you to listen to experienced Esperanto speakers when they speak, and see what might get shortened or left out. As a beginner, it's important to get the grammar right (and sound like an educated person) by speaking in complete sentences. Leaving things out comes with experience. (and pronouns are not what gets left out in Esperanto)