Quote:
Originally Posted by SPX
I'm not sure exactly what you mean about the accusative being equivalent to using ANY preposition. You'll have to explain that one.
In any case, the accusative is fairly easy for me with simple sentences. For instance:
La kato kaptis la insekton. "The cat captured the insect."
Okay, sure. The "insekto" is the noun that the verb acts upon. I can grasp that. But in more complex sentences it can get pretty confusing to me. I wish Zamenhof had just decided to this was not an important feature for the language and had, instead, opted for a specified word order.
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Of course, Zamenhof's first language was Russian, which has 5 cases and not just 2. SVO is the "unmarked" word order in Esperanto today, but any order is possible and can be useful to adjust emphasis, focus, or provide better flow of ideas in a discourse. However, I agree with you that remembering when to use the accusitive suffix and when not to is challenging for those of us whose first languages don't modify nouns this way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SPX
Yeah, exactly. Hate them. Very confusing and there are just too many of them, and many of them have multiple meanings.
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The issue of having multiple meanings is a sign that English and Esperanto divide the semantic territory differently. It's still troublesome for us native speakers of English. Add in the capacity to derive additional words from the correlatives, such as tiam = then (that time) [adverb], tiama = of that time/occasion [adjective].