Jen Nia Mondo, Lesson 5
Accusative case
The big moment that we have all been waiting for has arrived.
Consider the sentence
The dog chased the cat.
As we have said before, 'chased' is the verb; the perpetrator of the action, i.e., the subject, is 'the dog'; and the recipient of the action, i.e., the direct object, is 'the cat'. But how do we know that the dog, rather than the cat, did the chasing? A native speaker of English uses word order. The NP before the verb is the subject and the NP after the verb if the direct object. Every language is faced with the task of distinguishing the subject from the verb in sentences of this kind, and many of them use some mechanism besides word order. In Japanese the postposition 'ga' after a noun indicates that is the subject and the postposition 'wo' indicates a direct object. The verb in a Japanese sentence comes last. So "The dog saw the cat." is
Inu ga neko wo
mita.
In fact the situation in Japanese is more complicated than this, but the mechanism functions, as indicated, by means of markers that follow their nouns.
The same sentence in Zulu is
Înjá yâlibôna íkáti.
Nouns in Zulu are distributed more or less arbitrarily into one or another of 15 classes, and can be either singular or plural. The verb, in this case, 'yâlibôna' contains a marker, specifically 'y-', which corresponds to the class and number of the subject 'Înjá', and another marker, specifically '-li-', which corresponds to the class and number of the object, 'íkáti'. So the verb itself indicates which noun is the subject and which is the object. If all of these markers are different, then confusion can only arise when the subject and object happen to belong to the same class and are the same as to singular/plural. If the sentence had been "The cat saw the dog.", the verb would be 'lâyibôna'.
In many familiar languages (Latin, Greek, German, Russian, Polish, and other Slavic languages) the form of a noun depends on how it used in a sentence. Such languages are called case languages, and the different forms are called cases. All the forms of a noun taken together is called a declension. Latin has 5 cases and nouns can be either singular or plural; thus every noun has 10 different forms. The 10 forms for the Latin word for 'dog' are canis, canis, canī, canem, cane, canēs, canium, canibus, canēs, canibus. Subjects are generally in the nominative case, and direct objects are in the accusative case. In Latin the sentence "The dog saw the cat." would be
Canis vīdit fēlem
and the sentence "The cat saw the dog." would be
Fēlēs vīdit canem.
So how does Esperanto solve the problem of distinguishing subjects from direct objects? Esperanto, like Latin, is a case language. However, in contrast to Latin, which has 5 cases, German (4 cases), Russian (6), and Polish (7), Esperanto has only 2: the accusative case for direct objects and a few other things that we will deal with later, and the nominative case for everything else. The accusative marker is '-n' added to the end of a noun or an adjective. Adjectives agree with the nouns that they modify in both number and case. "The dog chased the cat." is
La hundo ĉasis
la katon.
and "The cat chased the dog." is
La kato ĉasis la hundon.
Remember that we said that English uses word order to solve the subject vs. direct object problem. Since case languages use another mechanism, it might be that the speaker is free is alter the word order for stylistic or other reasons. So it is in Latin and also in Esperanto. Note that verbs have a characteristic marker that makes it impossible to mistake them for anything else. The first of the above two sentences can have any of the following 5 alternate forms:
La katon ĉasis la hundo.
La hundo la
katon ĉasis.
La katon la
hundo ĉasis.
Ĉasis la
hundo la katon.
Ĉasis la
katon la hundo.
and the second of the two has these alternate forms:
La hundon ĉasis la kato.
La kato la
hundon ĉasis.
La hundon
la kato ĉasis.
Ĉasis la
kato la hundon.
Ĉasis la
hundon la kato.
The meaning is always clear because of the markers.
More about word order
So is it true that each of the 6 possible versions for "The dog chased the cat." are equally common and acceptable? The answer is 'no'.
In the 1960's the American linguist Joel Greenberg examined published data from many languages to see if he could find 'linguistic universals', that is, characteristics that all languages have in common. He also sought to show that certain characteristics are more common than others. He discovered that in almost all languages a particular ordering of the 3 elements, subject, verb, and object, is dominant in the sense that most sentences of the language obey that ordering although in special circumstances other orderings may be possible. For Subject, Verb, and Object, there are 3! = 3x2x1 = 6 possibilities: VSO, SVO, SOV, VOS, OVS, and OSV. English is an SVO language. Most of our sentences take that form, although sometimes we say things like "That I cannot abide." When the order deviates from the normal, we usually use some mechanism like intonation or extra heavy stress on some word to signal to the hearer that something out of the ordinary is going on.
Greenberg discovered that only the first three of the above possibilities are common. The last three are extremely rare. The verb can be either first, last, or in the middle, but the subject almost always precedes the object.
Verb first languages: Celtic family, Hebrew, Arabic
Verb last languages: Basque, Hungarian, Turkish, Persian, all languages of India, Japanese, Korean
Verb in the middle: English, most European languages,
Chinese, Bantu languages including Zulu and Swahili, almost all languages of
In his book Lingvistikaj Aspektoj de Esperanto, John Wells, the British linguist, specifically phonetician, who also wrote Jen Nia Mondo, states that SVO languages are the most common. I have seen a website which states that SOV languages are most common. I interpret that to mean that the frequency of the two types is about the same.
Since Zamenhof and most early writers whose works have shaped the language where non-Celtic speaking Europeans, it should not be surprising that Esperanto is an SVO language. Statistically most sentences are of that form. In my view it is desirable to have a standard word order which we deviate from only when there is a reason, because a sentence is more easily understandable if it conforms to the expectations of the hearer or reader. There is a statistical expectation that a sentence will be SVO.
An example of a sentence impossible in English but possible in Esperanto because of the relative freedom of word order is
Subite forigis
siajn gantojn la stranga viro kun
la nigra ĉapelo kaj ruĝa kravato
kiu dum longa
tempo akompanis la du belajn sinjorinojn de la parko al la fervoja stacio kaj kiu
de tempo al tempo rigardis malantaŭen
kvazau li kredis ke iu
eble sekvas lin.
A literal translation is
*Suddenly removed his gloves the strange man with the black hat and the red tie who for a long time had accompanied the two beautiful ladies from the park to the railway station and who from time to time looked back as if he thought that someone was following him.
The asterisk (*) indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical. When the subject of a sentence is a long noun phrase with
lots of modifiers, it is convenient to put the verb and object first, get them out of the
way, and then focus our attention on the NP.
If in the English sentence we shift 'suddenly removed his gloves' to the
end to make it SOV and grammatical, it might be awkward or confusing on a first reading.
Don't get carried away
Remember that a direct object receives the action of the verb. Consider the sentence "My brother is a monk." The subject is 'my brother', and the noun 'monk' follows the verb 'is', but it is not a direct object. It is not the recipient of any action. Verbs like 'to be (am, is are)' are called linking verbs, and they simply state that the subject is the same as something else. The NP that follows a linking verb is called a predicate noun or a predicate nominative. The term predicate refers to the verb and everything related to it, including direct objects and predicate nouns. A sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. 'To be' is far and away the most common of the linking verbs. Two others are 'seem' and 'appear'.
An adjective which follows a linking verb is called a predicate adjective; for example, 'red' in "The books are red."
In Esperanto predicate nouns are in the nominative case, not in the accusative. Predicate adjectives must agree in number with the subject. So "La libroj estas ruĝaj."
Except for some special situations which we will study
later, prepositions in Esperanto are followed by the nominative case.
The preposition 'je'
In the dialogue Petro says about his mother, "Mia patro kutime donas al
ŝi ruĝan rozon je ŝia datreveno.", and the text rather cryptically
defines 'je' as a preposition of indefinite meaning. We will
clarify that definition.
In English we sometimes use prepositions in a way not consistent with their basic meaning(s). For example, the basic meaning of 'with' is togetherness or accompaniment, as in "I went to the concert with my aunt.", but we say, "I wrote the letter with a pen.", where we mean that the letter was written by means of a pen. Another example also indicates how hard it is for a non-native speaker to always use the right preposition. You get on the bus, you get on the train, you get on the plane, but if you get on the car, you may fall off.
In Esperanto a preposition generally has only one basic meaning and several related secondary submeanings. In a few cases ('de' for example) there may be unrelated meanings, but the number of possible meanings is considerably fewer than in English. In any given situation you should select a preposition one of whose meanings matches the meaning you want to express. In the above example "I wrote the letter with a pen." we would say "Mi skribis la leteron per plumo." using the preposition 'per' whose basic meaning is 'by means of' rather than the preposition 'kun' which means 'with' in the sense of togetherness. Be as precise as you can with prepositions. You can't just translate mechanically word for word from English.
To avoid having to use a preposition in a way not consistent
with its intended meaning(s), Zamenhof cleverly created the preposition 'je',
which can be used whenever no other preposition is appropriate. In the modern language it is always used for
time expressions ('je la oka kaj duono' = 'at
Consistent with my desire to use prepositions as precisely as possible
and to minimize the use of 'je', I would have said 'ĉe ŝia datreveno',
but 'je' is acceptable. 'Ĉe' is a very common preposition which
indicates nearness or closeness, in space, in time, and
metaforically. Some other common prepositions and their basic
meanings are
por = for (purpose, goal), in order to
per = by means of
pro = because of
pri = about, concerning
kun = with (togetherness, acompaniment)
sen = without (absence)
dum = during
Updated 8/23/2004