Talk:Dative construction

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Two comments on the german part of the article:

1)Ich bin warm
As it really means "I am warm", it has a strong connotation of "I am gay", in a pejorative kind of way.
I suggest changing the sentence to "Ich bin kalt" and "Mir ist kalt" (I am cold) to avoid this issue altogether.

2)Er fehlt zwei Zähne
Contrary to the article, this is not valid german: Literally it means "He is absent two teeth" which is nonsense, because you cannot be absent for two teeth long.
(Unless you measure time in teeth, of course.)

"Fehlen" in this case always means "to be absent".
I tried hard to cone up with a better example, but i could not find a verb suitable to this kind of example.
The construction "noun(dative) verb(infinitive)" always means, verb is happening to noun, whereas "noun(nominative) verb(inflected)" means noun is doing verb.

I don't think this would be a good example at all, as it is very confusing.

(I am a native german speaker, so please forgive any errors in english.)
-- Johannes

Old English? Celtic?

I'm surprised that an Old English example is not given here.

A few Celtic examples might be interesting too.

Does anyone think these additions would be worthwhile? If so, I'd be happy to add some suitable examples.80.176.79.109 12:49, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Merge into Dative case

This article is about one use of the dative case for marking the "experiencer" with verbs of liking, lacking, feeling, etc., and the fact that in some languages, with some verbs, this dative noun phrase appears in the position normally occupied the subject. This is a notable phenomenon, but in my opinion it should be discussed directly (and with less multilingual detail) in the Dative case article. If the consensus is to keep this page, I suggest it should be renamed "Dative experiencer" or "Dative experiencer construction". CapnPrep 16:08, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Italian, French, and German?

Italian uses the very same constructions as Spanish:

   Mi piace l'estate. ("I like the summer")
   A me piace di più la primavera. ("[As for me,] I like the spring better")
   A Giovanni piacciono le bionde. ("Juan likes blondes")
   A lei piaci./Tu le piaci. ("She likes you") 

as well as French:

  L'étè me plaît.
  A moi, le printemps me plaît mieux.

(note the different word order)

and in German:

  Der Sommer gefällt mir.
  Mir gefällt der Frühling besser.

Which I think is a somewhat different construction from "Mir ist kalt".

Alas, I am not a linguist. I can just point to similarities... -- megA (talk) 10:13, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

The article says that the subject of Mir ist kalt is kalt. I disagree. kalt is an adjective. It would be odd for a non-substantivized adjective to be the subject of a sentence. Mir ist kalt is an impersonal sentence like Es ist kalt, only that the subject placeholder es is omitted. So it's not Cold is to me but [It] is cold to me. The corresponding question is never Was ist mir?, it is Wie ist mir?. Is there any academic source for the interpretation that kalt is the subject?--87.162.35.68 (talk) 09:21, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Anglocentric view of Language

The section on German shows a complete misunderstanding of how German grammar works. In the sentence "Mir ist kalt", the dative functions in no way whatsoever as a subject unless one is so locked into the English expression "I am cold" that no other relationship of these morphemes is possible. First position in a German sentence is hardly reserved for subjects. The explanation of "Mir war zu kalt um zur Kirche zu gehen" is also utter nonsense. One can just as easily say "Es war zu kalt, um zur Kirche zu gehen." Adding the "mir" is nothing more than the dative of interest.

The same goes for a verb like "gefallen" or Italian "piacere" where one can paraphrase a translation so that the dative at least makes sense in English: "to be pleasing to."

I don't know Georgian, but the examples from Russian, German, or Spanish are just perfunctory explanations of a few ways the dative case works in these languages while English is over-referenced.

Basically, these sections should be trashed. --Janko (talk) 23:25, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

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I agree with the critisism expressed by Janko. Most of this article feels like it's written by someone who only has a very limited understanding of languages other than English.

Serbo-Croation is a language were the personal pronoun is usually dropped when it's the subject. 'Hladno je' : 'it is cold'. "Hladno mi je" : impersonal sentence with dative of interest, or simply dative for indirect object. Nothing special, just idiomatic to the language.

The Latin example is nonsense. 'Mihi est liber' translates to 'the book is mine' or 'the book belongs to me'. "Liber" is the subject of that sentence. Period. No one in his right mind is going to claim that "mine" is the subject in a sentence like "Victory is mine" or "Mine is the power and the glory" ( granted that those are genitive rather than dative). Maybe "use of dative for possessive" can be added to the "dative"-page, but it is not an example of the subject of this page, namely " a sentence with the subject in the dative case and the direct object in the nominative case"

Obviously there's a number of languages that prefer an idiom involving dative over alternative expressions (or have distinct meanings for them) but explaining this in terms of "the subject is in dative case" is simply incorrect.

Compare French : "Il me faut <quelque chose>" : I need <something>; litt. "To me, it is needed <something>". Just because the only reasonable way to translate this to English is by changing the structure of the sentence and having the indirect object becomes the subject in the translation doesn't mean the original has its subject in the dative case. It obviously hasn't. --KoenNoens —Preceding undated comment added 23:22, 25 May 2013 (UTC)