Skip to the content
Reply

Preposition: Na

by BoriQa, June 28, 2013

Messages: 32

Language: English

pdenisowski (User's profile) June 29, 2013, 6:01:17 PM

RiotNrrd:The one feature of Esperanto that is (almost) universally hated by beginners seems so important later on that people have generated an entirely unnecessary way to express it.
Universally hated by beginners who speak languages without a (strong) case system. If you grew up speaking a language where the accusative (and other) cases are expressly marked, you might feel differently.

Try comparing Esperanto to a language like Polish, where the case of the direct object can depend on things such as a the verb you use or whether or not the direct object is a person or an animal.

Not to mention the fact that the endings depend on the gender of the object (masc, fem, neut) and that these endings can also cause changes in the word stem : pies (dog) -> psa.

Oh, almost forgot : if the sentance is in the negative (I don't have the car), then the direct object (book) is in the genative case instead of the accusative. : mam samochód but nie mam samochodu.

Coming from a language like that, the -n accusative is trivially easy.

Amike,

Paul

Rugxdoma (User's profile) June 29, 2013, 6:54:37 PM

pdenisowski:
RiotNrrd:The one feature of Esperanto that is (almost) universally hated by beginners seems so important later on that people have generated an entirely unnecessary way to express it.
Universally hated by beginners who speak languages without a (strong) case system. If you grew up speaking a language where the accusative (and other) cases are expressly marked, you might feel differently.
...
Coming from a language like that, the -n accusative is trivially easy.
Yes, compared to most European languages, Esperanto accusatives are easy. Still, in the Detala gramatika there are 163 blocks of information about accusative, and another 100 blocks about nominative. So it is not really a trivial thing to get the cases right always. But that is not really the fault of the accusative itself, or of the fact that Esperanto has an accusative, but rather caused by rules about how to link subphrases, rules for appositions and so on. These things are poorly regulated in the Fundaments of the Esperanto, leaving room for an import of patterns from various European languages, where the usage and the grammars are slightly different from language to language, and sometimes confused.

apok2 (User's profile) June 30, 2013, 1:06:59 AM

I've always been a bit perplexed over the confusion that the accusative -n seems to generate among beginning Esperantists. Esperanto has this one "case" that has a special ending. What's the problem with that? Look at the number of cases in Latin, German, Russian, Icelandic, Greek, Polish, etc. I repeat, I fail to see the problem. But then, I also fail to see the problem with using the -in- suffix, for another example.

Those who are continually trying to change things seem to forget one very important point, which is that if Esperanto is to function as a "lingua franca," it has to remain static. Introducing slang and neologisms defeat the purpose of having such a language. If Esperanto usage is going to change every six months or so, who is going to bother to learn it? New comers to Esperanto seem to think that experienced Esperantists are a bunch of old fogies, utterly opposed to change. They need to rethink this.

Language is a tool that we use to communicate with others of our kind. Grammar makes language function better. Why try to re-invent the grammatical points that make the language flow? This "na" affair seems utterly pointless to me. And those who take offense with grammatical gender, i.e., use of the suffix -in-, just come across as looking for an excuse to bellyache about something. Esperanto isn't perfect, but then, what IS perfect in this old world? malgajo.gif

x1004 (User's profile) June 30, 2013, 7:59:25 AM

pdenisowski:
RiotNrrd:The one feature of Esperanto that is (almost) universally hated by beginners seems so important later on that people have generated an entirely unnecessary way to express it.
Universally hated by beginners who speak languages without a (strong) case system. If you grew up speaking a language where the accusative (and other) cases are expressly marked, you might feel differently.
(...)

Coming from a language like that, the -n accusative is trivially easy.
And it is! The English exaggerate its difficulty a bit.

Oijos (User's profile) June 30, 2013, 9:55:28 AM

apok2:New comers to Esperanto seem to think that experienced Esperantists are a bunch of old fogies, utterly opposed to change. They need to rethink this.
To whom that They refers? Who needs to rethink?

michaleo (User's profile) June 30, 2013, 10:33:23 AM

Oijos:To whom that They refers? Who needs to rethink?
It seems obvious that it refers to newcomers. Because newbies shouldn't think that they are the wisest of all Esperantists and can immediately change language with which they aren't even familiar.

erinja (User's profile) June 30, 2013, 11:44:45 AM

x1004:And it is! The English exaggerate its difficulty a bit.
English speakers forget that every time they distinguish between "they" and "them", "he" and "him", "she" and "her", they are dealing with something very much like the accusative case. Obviously they need to learn that -n has different rules than "they" and "them" (direct object only, not indirect object, plus additional uses). But any English speaker who professes that Esperanto doesn't need the accusative, or that the accusative is just too difficult and not intuitive, is just not thinking. This English speaker presumably says "I saw him" and "He saw me" with ease, rather than "I saw he" and "He saw I".

Chainy (User's profile) June 30, 2013, 12:02:41 PM

erinja:"they" and "them"
As this distinction exists for such a word, I wonder if English speakers are more likely to remember 'iliN', but in other cases where no apparent change takes place in English, they also forget in Esperanto?

The reason why I'm wondering this is that as a lingvohelpanto here I sometimes have slavic students and I've noticed that even they can forget the accusative, particularly when a word in their own language happens to have the same ending in the accusative as in the nominative...

So perhaps it's a case of people following patterns in their native language, rather than understanding the actual concept of the accusative. Slavic students can get away with such an approach to a much greater extent as they have many more words that change in the accusative form.

erinja (User's profile) June 30, 2013, 12:47:26 PM

Chainy, I don't think I noticed any particular difference when I used to correct lessons, that English speakers got the -n right in pronouns more than any other nouns. I think they don't even realize that English has an equivalent of the accusative, you say they/them without thinking and it doesn't even occur to you that this has any link with ili/ilin. I actually think that Esperanto courses would do well to make a note of this, because this aspect of Esperanto is not as foreign as many English speakers may suppose. I would be interested to hear from others on this topic but I vaguely remember learning about -n and thinking "That's cool, it's a special marker that allows you to change word order". I absolutely did not mentally relate it to he/him, they/them, I/me. In fact it was only many years later, when I started correcting lessons, that the idea occurred to me that English also has a grammatical method of showing the accusative. This is what happens when you don't study the grammar of your native language in school!

darkweasel (User's profile) June 30, 2013, 2:58:05 PM

When you already know two languages, one native and one foreign one, and then learn a third one, you might actually be influenced by the second one more than by your first language!

I remember this from French classes at school, full of students who had already learned English as a second language. English sometimes places adverbs differently from both German and French. For example, in German you say ich mache das oft but in English you say I often do that.

Those students who remembered that English did it that way often seemed to think "oh, so seems like in other languages you don't place adverbs like in German" ... and then said *je souvent fais ça. ridulo.gif

There might be several reasons for this - you learn a foreign language much more consciously, while in your native language you never think about how grammatical elements work.

I could imagine that the same thing could happen to Slavic speakers who already know some English or French and then learn Esperanto.

Back to the top