WeekzGod:Though I love most grammatical things about the language, -n is something I cannot stand.
I hate how it sounds and I think it's redundant especially when the speaker is pretty consistent in their word order. What do you guys think?

I don't mind it at all, though I think an optimally designed auxiliary language probably wouldn't bother with an accusative case and would rely instead on word order and/or context to make the meaning clear. Flexibility when writing poetry etc is nice to have but to my mind it isn't a priority for a simple-to-learn auxlang.

Esperanto would be a very different language without the accusative though and I'm not sure I would prefer it over what we have now.

It seems to me that it would be exceedingly difficult to speak precisely in Esperanto without the accusative -n. Esperanto simply isn't built for it.

Complaining about something so essential as accusative case in Esperanto seems tantamount to complaining about having a separate ending for adjectives. Surely everyone understands from word order that "tokso ŝlimo" is toxic slime and not a slimy toxin -- why do we need a stupid -a ending!

The answer to this and your original complaint, of course, is that, because Esperanto *does* have these features, to remove them would very quickly create ambiguities. In the case of accusative, consider:

Mi ŝatas manĝi tion pli ol vi. - I like to eat that more than you do.
Mi ŝatas manĝi tion pli ol vin. - I like to eat that more than I like eating you.
Mi amas ŝin same forte kiel vi. - I love her as strongly as you do.
Mi amas ŝin same forte kiel vin. - I love her as strongly as I love you.

Examples taken directly from the basic grammar section of Lernu that detail simple sentences in which accusative is necessary and word order isn't going to help you.

rlsinclair:I agree, it is an official part of the language, which is why I hate Esperanto. If it were just a mistake by individual speakers I would still be supporting the language.

This being the case, why are you here?

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I hate the accusative in English. Too complicated! That is why I make sure to say "I see he" and "She sees I", "He sees they", etc. English has consistent word order so you don't need these complicated "objects" to be understood perfectly.

xdzt:Mi ŝatas manĝi tion pli ol vi. - I like to eat that more than you do.
Mi ŝatas manĝi tion pli ol vin. - I like to eat that more than I like eating you.
Mi amas ŝin same forte kiel vi. - I love her as strongly as you do.
Mi amas ŝin same forte kiel vin. - I love her as strongly as I love you.

Examples taken directly from the basic grammar section of Lernu that detail simple sentences in which accusative is necessary and word order isn't going to help you.

The first example will be clear enough on it's own without any help from the accusative. "How much I like eating you" is a pretty strange idea, so it's highly unlikely anybody will think you meant that.

For the second example we should bear in mind that "I love her as much as you" is equally ambiguous if you take it out of context, but in the real world it doesn't cause English speakers much of a problem. That's because we have the context available to us.. unlike when we quote a single sentence in a forum posting.

In any case you can disambiguate with added/modified wording: "kiel vi amas ŝin" as opposed to "kiel mi amas vin", without recourse to the accusative.

erinja:
This being the case, why are you here?

That is an interesting question. I am not sure I really know the answer. Basically it is because I still believe in the idea behind the language. I really wanted it to be right. Maybe that is why I am so angry and frustrated that it is such an amateurish mess.

tommjames:[..]

For the second example we should bear in mind that "I love her as much as you" is equally ambiguous if you take it out of context, but in the real world it doesn't cause English speakers much of a problem. That's because we have the context available to us.. unlike when we quote a single sentence in a forum posting.

In any case you can disambiguate with added/modified wording: "kiel vi amas ŝin" as opposed to "kiel mi amas vin", without recourse to the accusative.

You're seeing this purely from an English-speaker's point of view. This is supposed to be a language for all. You're comparing the Esperanto constructions to English ones without considering what they look like to native speakers of other languages. In the end, you can't compare the understandability of the Esperanto original by comparing the possible English translations.

Either way you would have needed some kind of indicator whether it's a suffix or a preposition to indicate the object because not all verbs are one-directional in the "application of the action" and not all objects are concrete. Esperanto isn't just meant to be simpler, it's also meant to be clear and precise and sometimes that means you have to accept something less attractive or more complicated for the sake of clarity. Just like natural languages you might say...

Polyglot:In the end, you can't compare the understandability of the Esperanto original by comparing the possible English translations.

Actually I can, because I was just making a point about context and its role is disambiguating phrases. It doesn't matter what the phrase "looks like", to an English speaker or to anybody else. English speakers don't have some special ability to understand context better than speakers of other languages, as far as I'm aware.

Polyglot:Esperanto isn't just meant to be simpler, it's also meant to be clear and precise and sometimes that means you have to accept something less attractive or more complicated for the sake of clarity

Oh I accept that Esperanto is meant to be precise, I just don't think the level of precision afforded by Esperanto's accusative case is necessary for an optimally designed universal auxlang. The benefits of a simpler system seem to me to outweigh the supposed advantages of extra clarity.

Here's why I think the mandatory accusative marking is a really good idea, and would never support any "reform" language that doesn't use it:

The "easiness" of a language comes both from ease of production (speaking/writing) and ease of recognition (listening/reading). These two are equally important for beginners. However, I believe that ease of recognition keeps its importance much more for advanced speakers than does ease of production.

Features of the language including the mandatory accusative marker, mandatory part-of-speech markings (-o, -a, etc.) and adjective-noun agreement is really good for ease of recognition. You don't need to guess what part of speech a word is: when reading or listening, as an advanced speaker or a beginner, it makes everything so much clearer. Comprehension is nearly instantaneous with little effort; you don't need to go through any process, conscious or unconscious, to figure out the parsing of a sentence. Same thing with the accusative: you don't need to go through any parsing whatsoever as to what is an object; it's marked there for you. And for adjective-noun agreement: you hear multajn grandajn hundojn, and before the speaker's finished the phrase, you know where it's going grammatically. It's plural; it's an object; all these words are part of the same phrase. No guess-work needed.

All this comes at a very slight cost in ease of production—a mild nuisance for English-speaking beginners, but a boon for all Esperanto-listeners.

@rlsinclair: Once you learn the language, you'll be able to appreciate it for what it is. Making judgements about it before you've learnt it does no good to anyone, including yourself.

tommjames:Oh I accept that Esperanto is meant to be precise, I just don't think the level of precision afforded by Esperanto's accusative case is necessary for an optimally designed universal auxlang. The benefits of a simpler system seem to me to outweigh the supposed advantages of extra clarity.

You make some good points. Yet as someone who has (to varying degrees) studied languages with very "simple" or isolating grammar such as Mandarin and Haitian Creole, I can attest that, at a certain point, simplicity takes a toll on the quick comprehensibility of sentences because the syntax is more poorly delineated. It can become tricky to unravel very long sentences.

Beginning English learners, for instance, can confuse parts of speech because English often does not give you an obvious way to separate nouns from adjectives or verbs (for example, the common words "light", "round", and "well", depending on context, can be any of the three, with the latter even able to serve as an adverb!).

So, to relate my post back to the subject of this thread, I feel that maximum clarity and maximum clarity cannot both be attained at once. Even Ido, which saw Esperanto's accusative as unnecessary, felt compelled to retain it as optional in certain situations. It's all a compromise, and the accusative is part of that compromise.

jchthys:All this comes at a very slight cost in ease of production—a mild nuisance for English-speaking beginners

"Very slight cost" is a bit of an exaggeration I think. As of today I've taught a lot of people Esperanto, as a lingvohelpanto on lernu.net and elsewhere, and I see it coming at quite a substantial cost. Not just to English speakers either.

Also bear in mind that the accusative in Esperanto has uses beyond marking direct objects. Here in particular I see plenty of confusion among non English speakers, so the issue isn't limited to the anglosphere as far as I can tell.