June 10, 2011 Spent a little while learning the aspect of
Esperanto I’ve been neglecting: how to ask how someone is,
general conversational phrases and such like. One thing that
confused me, was why greetings are presented in the accusative
case (they have an ‘n’ on the end). So at first, one might
expect (coming from a language that has only remnants of an
accusative case), that in order to say “Good day!” to someone,
you might say: - Bona tago = (a) good day. But this is not how
things are done! This is how you say it: A word with this
accusative ‘n’ normally has said ‘n’ because it is on the
receiving end of the action of a verb: - Kamelo manĝis la
kamelon = A camel ate the camel. The second camel is on the
receiving end of being eaten, so Esperanto uses the ‘n’ to show
this. Which means I could have written it: - La kamelon kamelo
manĝis = A camel ate the camel. And it’d mean the same thing!
But in English we rely on word order to tell who’s doing what.
So why are greetings (including phrases like “good n