Good evening,

I know that there are certain set roots which employ "-en" frequently (iri hejmen, iri supren). But consider the following sentences.

La ŝipo gvidiĝis havenen kiam la maristoj ekvidis la grizajn nubegojn.

La vetero bonegas hodiaŭ. Eble mi iros plaĝen.

Ĉiutage la geknaboj promenas lernejen.

Malsatiĝinte, ni ambaŭ decidis veturi kafeterien.

I'm wondering what people think about this more liberal use of "-en" as a pseudo-dative case; it seems like a nice way to avoid excessive repetitions of "al + noun". I believe this sort of construction is encountered in some Oriental languages, but what would you advise about its usage in Esperanto?

If you search the Tekstaro you find 5 hits for 'lernejen' versus 26 for 'al la lernejo'.

I suppose 'lernejen' is useful when in a specific context there might arise some hesitation over the double meaning of 'al la lernejo' - to a particular school, or to school.

But even when there is only one of something it seems that Esperanto prefers 'al' to '-en'.

'Al Parizo' is more common than 'Parizen'.

However you might argue that 'al Parizo is ambiguous. Meaning in the direction of Paris as well as actually arriving there. Kiam ni venis al Parizo...

Parizen seems to me to not so strongly imply arrival - more like Paris bound.

I don't actually think it's anything like a dative, particularly since Esperanto's construction of adverb + n can only be used on an adverb of location. So you can't use it in any case of "al + noun" - you can only do it when the noun is a location.

A real dative would allow you to use it also in situations like "I gave it to John" ("Mi donis ĝin al Johano", that's al + noun) -- this is the core meaning of a dative. Esperanto excludes this possibility with its adverbial construction, since John isn't a place.

erinja: A real dative would allow you to use it also in situations like "I gave it to John" ("Mi donis ĝin al Johano", that's al + noun) -- this is the core meaning of a dative. Esperanto excludes this possibility with its adverbial construction, since John isn't a place.

I'd certainly more or les understand it though ('Mi donis ĝin Johanen' ), probably because John is only on one place, so he can serve to identify that place too; there certainly is associated a direction with him. But perhaps it is not given directly to him?

By the way, I think classically the accusative 'for direction' is applied to nouns ("Parizon", not "Parizen" ), which I think makes more sense. But I suppose is less used nowadays because '-en' more clearly can only indicate a directional meaning.

PS: I don't like those stupid emoticons. It is e.g. impossible to type a quote before a parentheses...

Although *"Mi donas ĝin johanen" would be understood as meaning something like "I give it to John" (or "I give it in John's direction", "I give it John-ward" ), it would still be wrong, since Esperanto grammar doesn't, in fact, consider John to be a place.

Similarly, *"Mi iras kanten" would probably be understood as "I am going to the singing", even though it is grammatically wrong, since singing isn't a place either.

There are many things that we could say that would be wrong, even though they are easily understood. Understanding something isn't actually the marker for whether the grammar is correct or not. A sentence may have a lot of errors and still be understood correctly, but it doesn't mean we should talk like that.

You are undoubtedly right Erinja. But look at what I found in the Tekstaro;

aŭtoj nepras por iri laborejen, venigi infanojn lernejen, kluben aŭ amiken, butikumi aŭ ferii

Whether or not an adverb is an adverb of location seems more like a semantic distinction to me than grammatical. From a grammatical point of view all we have is an adverb in the accusative case. This is obviously possible within the language, so I see no grammatical problem with illogical and evitindaj usages like "laboren" or "amiken". At most we're talking about an inappropriate disregard for a root's meaning.

On the matter of how one determines whether an adverb actually is an adverb of location, or may be rightly regarded as one, I don't think the dictionary-defined meaning of the root's substantive form is the sole arbiter of this. In most instances you could point to the lack of locational meaning in the noun to explain the illogicality of words like "kanten", but it seems this is not the case without exception. There is, for example, nothing in the dictionary definition of "kongreso" that suggests it is a place, but "kongresen" is not exactly uncommon. The reason that word doesn't grate on the ear as much as "kanten" and the like is obvious: a congress is something which one is likely to associate and identify with location. The same is true of some other words like lito/liten (go to bed / iru liten), or domo/domen.

If someone asks you where you first met someone, you might respond "Mi renkontis ŝin kongrese". Now you could argue that the meaning of "kongrese" here is "while in attendance of a congress", but it seems quite clear that "kongrese" has adequately conveyed the idea of location, because that is what is expected from the context. Even if we insist that "kongrese" cannot be an adverb of location, we can at least say it has the capacity to function as one. So to say that an adverb cannot show location just because the noun isn't a place seems like an arbitrarily made up rule to me. Plenty of words are regularly used purely for their connotative or suggestive value, and nobody complains about this.

As a final point, PMEG says that illogical usages of directional adverbs (where the adverb really doesn't show any location) are "ne nepre evitendaj", and that some of them "helpas al klareco" and are "tradiciaj kaj facile kompreneblaj". These are few and far between however, and should be probably be used sparingly, if at all.