Traubenschorle, your comments did not anger anyone - viaj komentoj neniun kolerigis - Deine Vorschläge haben niemand verärgert - Only that just about every beginner wants to "reform" Esperanto - nur ke kvazaŭ ĉiu komencanto volas "reformi" Esperanton - Nur dass beinah jeder Anfänger Esperanto "reformieren" (sprich "verbessern") will.
Study and attain fluency - then, you will see what we mean - studu kaj atingu fluecon, tiam vi komprenos kion ni volas diri - lern' und erreiche flüssiges Esperanto, dann wirst Du uns verstehen robb

traubenschorle:Thanks for all your comments and arguments. I'd like to summarize the main arguments (feel free to add or correct):

Negative points

• the accusative is very hard for beginners
  
  I know that I'm a beginner and I feel sorry that my suggested "improvements" angered you.

1. Actually, Trauben, the accusative is not very hard for beginners who speak languages for which the accusative is marked (either always or only sometimes). Once I explain to my fellow anglophones that the "him" in "I love him" is the accusative case (even though we call it the "objective case" ), it's like a light bulb clicking on. I've had conversations with Spanish speakers that ran the same way. It's not that the Accusative is difficult per se; it's just that we aren't used to thinking of the forms we use AS "the accusative case" and as I've said before, it's our job as teachers to make students see the connection. From that point it's just a matter of remembering to use it when we don't usually do so in our own language. For instance, fter much practice, I rarely leave off the accusative ending on feminine nouns in Russian.

2. It doesn't really anger is, per se. It's more like it causes us to think, "OMG!!! Not this cr*p again!!!"

Negative points

• the accusative is very hard for beginners
  
• usefulness should outweigh tradition
  
• also other languages are changed (e.g. French)

Again, once you've learned a few simple grammatical concepts, the accusative is not "very hard". There are plenty of things more complex in Esperanto, as I have said, which nobody complains about.

This myth seems to largely come from monoglots (mostly anglophones) who struggle with basic grammatical concepts, even in their native language.

The accusative is used to:

1) indicate a direct object. Very simple concept.
2) indicate directionality (e.g., the difference between "here" and "hither" ), primarily after a preposition. Even simpler.
3) replace a preposition, normally je
4) express a duration of time

If you can grasp those 4 points, then you can account for about 99% of the accusative's uses. Even knowing the first 2 points is enough - you can completely avoid 3 and 4 by using prepositions instead.

Once you get to know the language a bit better, I think you will find the accusative is highly useful, removes ambiguity, and makes sentences less monotonous.

Please reserve judgment on the accusative - and other features of the language which you may find confusing or unhelpful - until you are a little more familiar with Esperanto. I think you will discover that there is a "reason behind the madness", and almost everything has its purpose.

I know that I'm a beginner and I feel sorry that my suggested "improvements" angered you.

I'm not angry, just a little frustrated that people think they can "improve" the language despite not having studied it yet. I frankly find it condescending, though understandable, given the misconceptions about Esperanto as a "toy" in popular culture.

Tempodivalse:

I know that I'm a beginner and I feel sorry that my suggested "improvements" angered you.

I'm not angry, just a little frustrated that people think they can "improve" the language despite not having studied it yet. I frankly find it condescending, though understandable, given the misconceptions about Esperanto as a "toy" in popular culture.

I also want to add that to some people, for example me, Esperanto is an everyday language. It's the language that we speak at home. Maybe you understand that it might cause bad feelings, if some beginner ­– so actually an outsider – passes by and wants to change your everyday language because ... hmm too difficult.

It sounds like you want to join our community but instead of adopting to us you expect us to adopt to you.

FYI experienced Esperanto speakers are used to hearing reform proposals from beginners. You can imagine how that feels, that someone has not even bothered to learn it to any degree of fluency before deciding to change it. You can imagine how old it gets to explain the same things again and again. It may not look that way to you but everyone here is actually being astonishingly patient and kind, considering that this is not the first, the second, or even the tenth time they have explained this to yet another beginner.

It's akin to having lots of visitors in your house, and every visitor suggests upon arrival that you rearrange your kitchen, without even spending any time living there first. You would get pretty annoyed having to explain every single time that the kitchen setup actually works pretty well and it's not worth the hassle of ripping everything out just to move a single light switch to a new location that might not even be more convenient. You might start getting snippy and rude to these visitors, after the 10th or 20th or 100th visitor suggests "improvements" that create more problems than they solve, without actually trying out the current setup for any length of time, to see how it works. You might feel like ripping out your hair in frustration at the prospect of explaining yet again why the drinking glasses are separate from the coffee mugs even though they both hold liquids, as your visitors fight you on this point every step of the way. The point is, the architect designed it this way, it actually works pretty well, and maybe you should try it out before suggesting that the inhabitants of the house rip out their kitchen over something that most of them don't see as a problem at all, let alone a problem worth ripping out a kitchen over.

...ripping out a kitchen and redoing it is easier than reforming Esperanto. And we wouldn't rip out our kitchen just because a visitor thinks the sink would be better here and the refrigerator there.

traubenschorle:
Negative points

• the accusative is very hard for beginners
  
• usefulness should outweigh tradition
  
• also other languages are changed (e.g. French)

• The accusative is only very hard for some beginners. As cases go, it's not a particularly hard one. And there's only one ending for it in Esperanto! If you want to see hard, study the Latin declensions.
  
• The accusative is absolutely necessary in Esperanto. Without it, you can't tell who or what is doing the action and who or what is directly receiving the action. E.g. Viro hundo mordis (did the man bite the dog - viro hundon mordis, or the other way around - viron hundo mordis; you can't tell without the accusative). Esperanto does not use word order or prepositions for this.
  
• I'm not sure what you mean by 'other languages are changed', so I guess I can't comment on that.

traubenschorle:Thanks for all your comments and arguments. I'd like to summarize the main arguments (feel free to add or correct)...

I don't think anyone is angry at you.

My post certainly wasn't meant in anger; it was just an illustration of how silly it is to come up with "improvements" to an existing, living language. I don't actually expect Germany to suddenly do away with "die" and "das" just because I had trouble remembering what was what back in High School.

As has been stated, the reaction we had is more of an eye-rolling "here we go again" sort of thing. Your reform idea isn't new. Heck, *I* had that idea myself, because I hated the accusative when I first started learning. I do not hate the accusative anymore, however, because once I eventually "got" it and saw it in action, it made complete sense.

It's not so much that it's hard. It's just unfamiliar, and therefore requires a bit more effort.

eshapard:The accusative is absolutely necessary in Esperanto. Without it, you can't tell who or what is doing the action and who or what is directly receiving the action. E.g. Viro hundo mordis (did the man bite the dog - viro hundon mordis, or the other way around - viron hundo mordis; you can't tell without the accusative). Esperanto does not use word order or prepositions for this.

The initial post of this thread contains the motivation: To rely on the word-order instead of grammatical cases for marking roles in a sentence and that's definitely a possible solution with its own downsides and avails. So the question, why Esperanto is the way it is, is a very valid one.

So then we have the use of "en la domo" and "en la domon" (in the house, into the house - im Haus and ins Haus).... and Mi elektis lin kiel prezidento vs Mi elektis lin kiel prezidenton. So for international communication this -n thingy works pretty well!

Fenris_kcf:
The initial post of this thread contains the motivation: To rely on the word-order instead of grammatical cases for marking roles in a sentence and that's definitely a possible solution with its own downsides and avails. So the question, why Esperanto is the way it is, is a very valid one.

My understanding was that he was asking about why it is still necessary (given his impression that many esperantists use the SVO order) to use the accusative case; not why Esperanto uses the accusative case instead of word order (or why Esperanto is the way it is).

I was also directly responding to his suggestion that the accusative was not useful.