I was looking at reviews of Akira Okrent's book "In the Land of Invented Languages," and came across this statement*:

Alana:The erosion of the suffix to mark the object of verbs in Esperanto except in the case of certain frequently used words has led to IRREGULAR WORDS IN ESPERANTO!!!! Joy.

Really? I doubt it. There are two basic possibilities here: either the reviewer is right, or is wrong. From this I can make the following outline of possibilities:

I. The reviewer is right.

1. The error of omitting the accuzative ending has become so common that it is no longer considered an error.
2. The Academy of Esperanto decided that the accuzative isn't cool anymore, so they did away with it (This is a list of possibilities, not necessarily likely to be true!).

II. The reviewer is wrong.

1. The reviewer is mistaken.
a. The reviewer is confuzing modern Esperanto with Ido or a similar project.
b. The reviewer has hung around with komencantoj or poor speakers so much that s/he thinks that is real Esperanto.

2. The reviewer is lying.
a. The reviewer is an anti-Esperantist who wants to confuze the public.
b. The reviewer gets a thrill out of making dogmatic statements on the internet, so people will believe them, and so make them true. (The only real difference between a. and b. is the motive).

Any input?

*If you follow this link, scroll down to find the review (look for Alana) and click to read more. The statement is at the very end of the review.

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Edit
Add II.1.c. The reviewer found this "information" in the book.

The reviewer is making reference to a passage in Okrent's book where she claims, wrongly, that the accusative ending is in "the process of being lost". The passage in question is:

Arika Okrent:Languages like Esperanto have an advantage [when it comes to grammatical irregularities] in that they are built from preexisting conventions—the general language habits of speakers of European languages. Esperanto itself does particularly well because it developed its own culture and community, and therefore has better-defined conventions for what words mean and how they should be used. But at the same time, it has sacrificed some of the perfect regularity that it was intended to have. For example, the accusative -n ending used to mark the object of a verb is in the process of being lost. Speakers often leave it out—and joke about what a pain it is to remember to use it—and one study found that even native speakers don’t use it all that consistently, even when the language of their home country has an accusative marker. But they always use it when they say saluton, “hello,” or dankon, “thanks.” Those words were originally formed as the objects of verbs (as in “I wish you greetings” or “I give you thanks”); now they are just set phrases that happen to have an -n ending. But they are used so often, and their forms are so established by habit, or convention, that they are immune from the erosion of the grammatical marker they express.

Arika is super nice and has been very kind to the Esperanto movement, but her actual language capability in Esperanto is minimal. Someone probably incorrectly told her something like "The accusative is falling out of use" and she believed them because her Esperanto in't too wonderful, so she couldn't judge for herself. This is probably why she put this erroneous information in her book. She may also have read a paper that was put out some time back on denaskuloj; I believe there is such a paper that says something about denaskuloj being inclined to drop the -n even when it belongs somewhere. Even if this is the case, denaskuloj are a tiny percentage of Esperanto speakers, and their word on what is or isn't correct isn't viewed as being authoritative.

Thank you. I have not (as you can probably tell) read the book yet. It was recommended to me by another lernu user, and I was looking at reviews and excerpts to see if I wanted to buy it. I think I will, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

So, the accusative is still alive and well? That is a relief! If it leaves, so do I, lol.

Hmmm... maybe we can find a way to convince Arika to come here and learn Esperanto better! But, maybe she's too busy studying Klingon .

LONG LIVE THE ACCUSATIVE!!!!!

The only way that the accusative, in its primary function of signalling the direct object, could disappear from the language, is if the coursebooks, internet courses, and classes were to no longer teach it.

The chance of this happening is zero. As is the probability that denaskuloj would ever be more than a tiny proportion of speakers.

Esperanto is not just an another language. The proportion of speakers who are komencantoj is high. Therefore any statistic on usage, like the count of the number of times the accusative is omitted in speech does not have the same relevance as it would for a national language.

And in any case any such omissions in the speech of komencantoj are likely to be random rather than systematic.

Edit: the omission of 'n' and reliance on word order in such sentences as below is an entirely separate issue.

Kiom da, Pierre volas.
Zamenhof amis William.

The paper by Bergen containing the alleged loss of the accusative by denaskuloj is controversial, see the replication by Lindstedt.

It is probable that Bergen has looked at the "wrong" families, where the parent(s) speaking Esperanto has/have problems with the use of the accusative, too (I've seen such cases in the DENASK mailing list), so that the children have learnt it inconsequently.

As a counterexample I can also adduce our son, born in 2011, who does not make any mistakes with regard to the accusative (except for seldom pleonastic use after al, and I'm not sure whether he has already really acquired the accusative of measurement); and also with regard to the conditional, participles etc. I see that he speaks exactly as I do - whence else he should have taken the language?

Kirilo81:As a counterexample I can also adduce our son, born in 2011, who does not make any mistakes with regard to the accusative (except for seldom pleonastic use after al, and I'm not sure whether he has already really acquired the accusative of measurement); and also with regard to the conditional, participles etc. I see that he speaks exactly as I do - whence else he should have taken the language?

Super!

Kirilo81:The paper by Bergen containing the alleged loss of the accusative by denaskuloj is controversial,

Just finished reading this. All I can think is "imagine what conclusions we could come to about native speakers of English, if we based our analysis on children!" Like, all that business about vowel and consonant reduction; kids always do that, regardless of language!

Kirilo81:
As a counterexample I can also adduce our son, born in 2011, who does not make any mistakes with regard to the accusative (except for seldom pleonastic use after al, and I'm not sure whether he has already really acquired the accusative of measurement); and also with regard to the conditional, participles etc. I see that he speaks exactly as I do - whence else he should have taken the language?

Epic! Keep up the good work! (In my experience, 3yr olds don't understand measurement anyway, accusative or none!)

My 4yr old sister says "ne" and "estas freneza", but that's about it. My 9yr old brother seems to understand a lot of what I say in Esperanto, but says little besides the aforementioned phrases, and "Mi frapos vin," which is based on something I said to him (cuz I'm just that bad), not on any understanding of grammar. And the rest of the family are either babies or anti-Esperantists.

Christa627:
My 4yr old sister says "ne" and "estas freneza", but that's about it. My 9yr old brother seems to understand a lot of what I say in Esperanto, but says little besides the aforementioned phrases, and "Mi frapos vin," which is based on something I said to him (cuz I'm just that bad), not on any understanding of grammar. And the rest of the family are either babies or anti-Esperantists.

Oh, and the 9yr old sometimes goes around monotonously singing "Dek klubanoj, verda stel'," over and over!

At this point I can't resist a memorable quote from my aforementioned brother:

Well, you shouldn't kabei, you should just crocodile all the time!

Yup, that's what I have to put up with !