Solulo:La virino melkas bovinon.
Bovinon melkas la virino.
Bovinon la virino melkas.
Melkas la virino bovinon.

and not; The cow milks a woman.

Accusative is the most beautiful of all the cases. Millions of people know about that.

There is a nice Polish sentence:

"Dziewczyna doiła krowę nad rzeką, a w wodzie odbijało się to na odwrót"

"A girl milked a cow near a river, and it was reflected reversely in water"

I guess this makes me an Esperanta parolanto, and not an Esperantisto then

Oh, silly me, I always thought that an esperantist was the one who spoke esperanto. It seems there is more to that. "Fina venko" ?

Solulo:Accusative is the most beautiful of all the cases. Millions of people know about that.

No way- genitive is where it's at

razlem:

Solulo:Accusative is the most beautiful of all the cases. Millions of people know about that.

No way- genitive is where it's at

No, no... genetive is a very "stupid" case. It's very often ambiguous in most languages;

"La invito de mia amiko mirigis mian patron."
Who invited whom? My friend invited me or I invited him.

BTW a learner of English (a beginner) once made a comment in my presence; "what a funny language English is that can't distinguish between; my brother's shirts and my brothers' shirts."

Solulo:
BTW a learner of English (a beginner) once made a comment in my presence; "what a funny language English is that can't distinguish between; my brother's shirts and my brothers' shirts."

Well, some other languages don't always distinguish singular and plural at all (in French you can hear the difference only in the determiner, and there are some German dialects where you often can't hear any difference at all). So actually that's not extremely funny.

Solulo:"La invito de mia amiko mirigis mian patron."
Who invited whom? My friend invited me or I invited him.

No question: My friend invited me. That's it!
The other direction would be: "La invito al mia amiko ..."

Amike

Espi:

Solulo:"La invito de mia amiko mirigis mian patron."
Who invited whom? My friend invited me or I invited him.

No question: My friend invited me. That's it!
The other direction would be: "La invito al mia amiko ..."

Amike

Not necessarily. De can also point to the object of an action noun.

sudanglo:

I guess this makes me an Esperanta parolanto, and not an Esperantisto then

As a matter of curiosity, Ceiger, what proportion of your 4000 posts have been in Esperanto?

Not too much at all (at least, most have been bilingual or mostly English, and most have been in the English section). I said I was a parolanto, not a flua or bona parolanto

The distinction is though that I'm interested in the language itself, not all the ismo stuff that comes with it.

And 4000 posts means nothing about my fluency. It means I'm a long winded bastard.

Geo63:Oh, silly me, I always thought that an esperantist was the one who spoke esperanto. It seems there is more to that. "Fina venko" ?

I thought the same too, but recently I've gotten the impression I have to be a finvenkist to be an Esperantist!

Solulo:No, no... genetive is a very "stupid" case. It's very often ambiguous in most languages;

We could do something crazy and have an accusative, genitive, and oblique case, and use then without giving into the chaotic myriad of interpretations that natural languages have given those cases

But also, the genitive is mostly a disaster in European languages, like German, Slavic, etc languages.

This is because Indo-European did not have true prepositions, like we have today. Instead, the cases did all the work, and the prepositions/postpositions were just adverbs describing the exact manner the noun case was functioning in.

As a result, when more and more cases started splitting up or fusing together in later Indo-European languages, there was no foundational rule about which case should use which prepositions anymore.

Compare this to say Japanese or Turkish or Finnish, and they use their "genitive" constructions a lot more regularly. For extra information (for example, "li estas inter la du uloj"), you structure things debatebly more logically, e.g. in Japanese you use a genitive and locative case combination, e.g.

"Yama no naka ni arimasu" (I might be making error here!) might mean "(ĝi) estas en la monto", or more literally, "ĝi estas ĉe la mezo/en-o de la monto".

So, rather than having prepositions, or adverb+case combinations, they deal with things more nominally. I think Turkish might be similar, since they don't really have any prepositions, but you might need someone else to explain it.

Turkish cases

EDIT: Ha, my suspicions were correct. Turkish does the same thing as Japanese, by saying "I am located at the inside/interior of the house" rather than "I am inside the house". See here and compare to the previous link (Turkish Cases) if you're interested in it.

ceigered:EDIT: Ha, my suspicions were correct. Turkish does the same thing as Japanese, by saying "I am located at the inside/interior of the house" rather than "I am inside the house". See here and compare to the previous link (Turkish Cases) if you're interested in it.

I don't see any problem here. In Polish you can say:

Jestem wewnątrz domu - I am at the interior of the house

or

Znajduję się wewnątrz domu - I am located at the interior of the house

dom (house) - domu (of the house)

Does it mean that Polish is Turkish?

Henüz Türk değilim!!!

Maybe Turkish is Polish.. It's all a conspiracy to confuse us people who don't live in Europe

(I think the main difference is that in our Indo-European languages we use prepositions (in perhaps a confusing manner when we also use cases at the same time), where as in other languages they use "nouns" that act like prepositions.... I'll shutup bout that since I'm a bit off topic now).