Fenris_kcf:As if experienced speakers advocating reform-proposals would be taken serious ... sure.

Experienced speakers rarely advocate reform-proposals.

It has nothing to do with being taken seriously. It has everything to do with being experienced.

Vorto "no" signifas objekton de ago kaj "na" indikas kiel iu vorto havas tio propreco.
Sekvante tiu logiko, subjekto signifas per vorto "_o" kaj per "a" povas indiki subjekta propreco.
"A kato havas na vosto."
(en rusa lingvo estas la vorto kun vortradiko "_", tiu estas vasteuzita "вынуть")

But in "rare exception," as a juror, for example, if a policeman report states, the well known "John batis Fred," wouldn't you wish that there were a -n/-on or a "na" somewhere?

Not particularly, no. If it weren't already clear from context who did the beating, I would assume that Fred was being beaten. If for some reason things were still unclear, I would slap on -on with hyphen for clarity. The point is that there's always a good way to get around without *na. The situations that you and others bring up are really rare, and it is questionable whether contrived instances of ambiguity really justify a new preposition. Practically, it's not necessary. I see news and encyclopedia articles in Esperanto all the time with non-Esperanticised names, never with na.

The earliest adopters of Esperanto used the subject-verb-object order used by almost all European languages. But thanks to the existence of the accusative and "various inflectional devices", plus the fact that the 16 rules in the Fundamento give little guidance in regards to word order, the French Esperantist Pierre Janton argues "that Esperanto syntax allows Japanese speakers to render 'the dog saw the cat' as 'la hundo la katon vidis' or Arabic speakers to say 'vidis la hundo la katon', just as they would in their own languages."[1]

Mr Janton is technically correct - there is nothing wrong with defaulting to non-SVO word order - but all proficient Esperanto speakers, regardless of their linguistic background, use predominantly SVO, and persistent deviations are odd-sounding and not natural.

It is perhaps the fault of Esperanto promoters that they insist you can "preserve the word order from your own language". This is not accurate. If you want to be considered a proficient speaker and not draw attention to your syntax, you use the standard word order. This is just like in other languages that have a flexible word order, but still tend towards a particular one (like SVO for Slavic languages).

I suspect that in a court of law, it wouldn't be 'John batis Fred', (perfectly clear anyway to an experienced Esperantist), but S-ro John Smith batis S-ron Fred Jones (perfectly clear even to a beginner).

Apart from the fantasy of Esperanto being used in a court of law to give evidence and that evidence being given by a Japanese or Arabic komencanto, for it all to go wrong you have to imagine that the interpreter translating into the language of the court is an incompetent unable to recognise the level of command of the language in the witness.

And on top of that you have to imagine that the lawyers have no idea about how to challenge, and ask for clarification of, any evidence.

Pardonu, ĉu vi atestas ke Fred estis batita de John?

Anyway, the error of logic here is to assume that because Esperanto allows deviation from SVO, that actually a significant body of speakers customarily deviate from SVO to the point that in their version of Esperanto SVO is not dominant, so that in their dialect John batis Fred might be uncertain.

Roch:But in "rare exception," as a juror, for example, if a policeman report states, the well known "John batis Fred," wouldn't you wish that there were a -n/-on or a "na" somewhere?

Nope. If you interpreted it in any way other than John doing the hitting and Fred being hit, you would essentially be contriving your own ambiguity - much like saying that "John was hit by a bat" is ambiguous because it could mean either that someone used a sports bat to hit him, or that he was hit next to a place where a bat was resting, or even that he was hit by an animal bat that was flying around.

Furthermore, if we are going to contrive ambiguity and then change the language to fix it, eoes this mean that English needs a new word for differentiating an animal bat and a sports bat, and that English needs a new preposition to remove the ambiguity of "by" meaning location and "by" meaning "by means of"? Of course not. That would be a silly response to a minor issue! Of course if there was a doubt someone could ask "Do you mean that someone used a baseball bat to hit John" and someone could say "No, it was a bat, an animal, and it flew out and hit him" or else "No, he was hit by a falling shelf, next to the place where there is a big bat mural on the wall".

Tempodivalse:I see news and encyclopedia articles in Esperanto all the time with non-Esperanticised names, never with na.

Of course not. It's not official. Though i do use "na" i don't use it when contributing to the Esperanto Wikipedia.

Fenris_kcf:

Tempodivalse:I see news and encyclopedia articles in Esperanto all the time with non-Esperanticised names, never with na.

Of course no. It's not official. Though i do use "na" i don't use it when contributing to the Esperanto Wikipedia.

What I meant to say was that I never feel that something is unclear or missing when I see un-Esperanticised names with no overt accusative marker. It is always quite clear, at least if the author knows how to write and has taken a minimum of effort not to be ambiguous. Look at an article (say on the Chinese news wire) overflowing with non-Esperantised names and be honest with yourself.

It's easy to contrive a situation where some part of Esperanto will be unclear, but if such situations don't crop up in the real world, I don't see a problem.

In the case of garden-variety sentences like Mi uzas Linux, I don't see how it's possible for an attentive reader to be confused.

Roch:BTW, I don't like that they call na, a preposition, I would prefer some name that they use for -n and -on, maybe a "accusative marker" or something! Anyone have a better idea?

I would call it "unnecessary", and leave it at that.

Roch:BTW, I don't like that they call na, a preposition, I would prefer some name that they use for -n and -on, maybe a "accusative marker" or something! Anyone have a better idea? Tempodivalse maybe? Since you were ready to use such a thing in last resort!

Except that *na is a preposition. That's what prepositions are - they're little words that you put before substantives to indicate their role in the sentence.

Tempodivalse:

Roch:BTW, I don't like that they call na, a preposition, I would prefer some name that they use for -n and -on, maybe a "accusative marker" or something! Anyone have a better idea? Tempodivalse maybe? Since you were ready to use such a thing in last resort!

Except that *na is a preposition. That's what prepositions are - they're little words that you put before substantives to indicate their role in the sentence.

I thought a preposition indicated the relationship between a noun and another noun/element in the sentence. I would call it a particle, because na means nothing without the word it is marking.