Quote:
Originally Posted by wrholt
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.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "cases." I have seen that term used a lot recently but the only cases that I know about are uppercase and lowercase and something tells me that's not what you're talking about, ha ha.
As for Zamenhof's first language, I think that is an interesting story unto itself. You probably are already aware of all this, but from Wiki:
"He considered his native language to be his father's Russian, but he also spoke his mother's Yiddish natively; as he grew older, he spoke more Polish, and that became the native language of his children. His father was a teacher of German, and he also spoke that language fluently, though not as comfortably as Yiddish. Later he learned French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English, and had an interest in Italian, Spanish and Lithuanian."
He was a language fiend. I wonder what it is that fascinates some people about languages to the point of basically hoarding them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wrholt
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].
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Yes, it's confusing. It was upon running into the accusative and the correlatives that I realized Esperanto was going to be no cake walk. It's supposed to be "the easiest language to learn" or whatever, but in a lot of ways it's more confusing to me than Spanish.
One thing it does really have going for it is tenses, though. Learning how to express present, past, future, etc. is SO much easier. Spanish and all the conjugations kill me. That's why in years of on again/off again study I've never really made it out of the present tense.