Alkanadi:

Vestitor:Some even thwart native speakers, often because of the constant tinkering with the language over the years which adds changes to forms they have already learned at school.

I could be wrong but I think stability is a more desirable attribute of a language, as opposed to accuracy or efficiency.

The changes have never added that. They just confuse the generations. The Dutch navigated their way around the globe in the 17th century and started the world's first multinational company (blame them!), produced Rembrandt and Erasmus, all with the language that must have been stable enough, but which specialists later seemed to think was imperfect!

I am anti-tinkering once the language has proven itself to work. However, the reduction of articles to De and Het in Dutch was probably a good idea.

Vestitor:The changes have never added that. They just confuse the generations.

Perhaps we can learn from this mistake.

traubenschorle:So why is the accusative still necessary in spoken language?

The rules that specify when to use the accusative cannot be abolished. However, an "autoritata centra institucio" can declare in which cases it is tolerated not to use the accusative where normally, it is required - that's "Fundamento"!

People omit accusative most of the time not because they don't know its use, but because they are too stressed to pay attention to it.

This seems like an odd reason to remove the accusative. Speaking Esperanto is stressful?

I don't get what the problem is. If you *look* at the living Esperanto and its speakers, you will see that the accusative is alive and well. Most learners get the hang of it quite easily, so that after some practice it becomes automatic.

Sure, it's true that the language would have been simpler without the accusative. But I don't understand how this is relevant. (And I'll repeat that simpler does not always equal easier.)

traubenschorle:Many people don't get hang of the accusative.

If Esperantists are on average more educated and all that, those interested in it should learn to do a basic syntatic analysis in their mother tongues. The accusative is one of the easiest cases to grasp, all languages have it even if they don't morphologically mark it. Had Zamenhof decided to include the antipassive and middle voice in Esperanto people would even be happier with 10 cases. Whenever I see complaints about the accusative case I wish Zamenhof had also included the partitive case to now make people think not only about direct objects but also about whether the noun is countable and whether it was wholly affected by the verb, i.e. eating the whole cookie vs. eating part of it.

As it has been stated before, the accusative allows for a freer syntax, which is useful in many ways, and since not everybody's mother tongue has an SVO word order all the more reason to leave the accusative alone.

Suzumiya:I wish Zamenhof had also included the partitive case

He did: many people have issues with de/da distinction.

Armand6:He did: many people have issues with de/da distinction.

But not the way I mean, I mean it in a more Finnish way. For the sake of argument let's say -k marks the partitive case just like -n marks the accusative.

Thus:

Mi manĝas biskviton means I eat the whole cookie.

Mi manĝas biskvitok means I don't eat the whole cookie.

Mi parolas esperantok would be the only way to say it because languages are uncountable.

Unless you can use 'da' in the 2nd sentence in a similar way to French Esperanto doesn't have a partitive case.

There would be plenty of people who would complain about that because it's 'harder'. The accusative is easy, but if those who strugle to understand it cannot even point out the direct object of a verb in their own languages then naturally the accusative will seem impossible. Hence my remark on the importance of knowing one's mother tongue first.

To repeat something that was written earlier, the terms "me", "him", "her", "us" and "them" are accusatives in English. There are also possessives (mine, your, his, her, its, our, and their as well as yours, ours, and theirs, e.g. This is our car - it is ours). Nobody seems to lose their socks over this and there are scads of non-native English speakers who mess this up completely and yet who claim that English is SOOOOO easy (they also screw up prepositions, verbal conjugations, the difference between countable and non-countable, the use of the article e.g. Nature, Life - not The nature, the life.... except when these forms ARE grammatically correct as in The nature of the beast....) and I am told over and over again in faulty, foreigner English how simple and neat English is and why I am a jerk to like Esperanto - only that these people could not even pass an entrance exam at the university where I used to teach because their usage in English is so terrible - yes, easy, easy, easy....
To be honest, I am sick and tired of these discussions. They iriitate me. I don't understand why the speakers of some languages in which the accusative is very active (I don't like THEM, not I don't like THEY*) can't just "go with the flow" - that is how children acquire their first language. They don't oppose their peers and parents and say: Well, I learned that -ed is the past marker so why do you say "went" and not "goed"? - No they mess up and then through usage they acquire the correct form and adult English speakers (natives) rarely used to mess up things like that except now people are saying "I shoulda ran away" - even at the university level. I guess I am just tired of hearing people criticize a sane and solid system in Esperanto since I speak such a simple language as English (sic) on a day to day basis and I know how ridiculous the claims against Esperanto are.
Sorry for ranting, but it just galls me.
Those people who have not really mastered English and are such avid supporters of it as "an easy to learn" language just seem stupid to me. It is like they are telling me that I am the stupid one because I use Esperanto and they try to put me down. I JUST DON'T GET IT, dudes. It is bunk.

This paper, written by Bruce Sherwood more than three decades ago, brings some light to the debate. (See pp 3-7)

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~basherwo/docs/EsperantoParol...

About the principle of "neceso kaj sufiĉo", I would be more conservative, because the speaker is not always in the best position to decide if the context is sufficient to omit accusative in a non-SVO sentence. (See example 27)

robbkvasnak:To repeat something that was written earlier, the terms "me", "him", "her", "us" and "them" are accusatives in English.

Those are definitely not accusatives: *hin and *hea would be such. Those are objective case forms, and, unlike the Esperanto's accusative case, they do not pose a problem for anyone.