--- In cybalist@..., markodegard@... wrote:
> I've always found the dative case to be a little weird. We
> monolingual students of languages are at most left with the
statement
> that it refers to the indirect object. --The IEist put the
> reconstruction into the book.
>
> But then, when you hang around language goups on the net, you learn
> about the benefactive, the 'for-datives'. And you start thinking
about
> 'from' constructions. --Beekes omits [a] from PIE.
>
> And you also read about how dative-ablative collapsed together, etc.
>
> Just what is the dative, in *pure* terms?
>
> I collect English prepositions as a hobby. We have too many of them.
I recall from German lessons in school that you had develop a sort
of "feel" the dative (Danish doesn't have it). It's okay to replace
your native "for + N" and "to + N" constructions with datives but it
doesn't really do it for your mind, so to speak. Those that abhorred
the German language never seemed to get it.
To be a little bit more concrete, those countries that have a dative
can do great things with it on monuments. Three examples:
1 Over the stairs of the German Reichstag is the text
"Dem Deutschen Volke". You couldn't have written
"An das Deusche Volk". It would have sounded like the label on a
Christmas gift. That allative (?) construction would in Hegelian
fashion have posited an ablative question in people's minds "Von
wem?" "From who(m)?", and the answer "From uncle Wilhelm",
uncomfortably close to the truth, might be ineradicable, once
having entered.
2 In Riga I saw the freedom monument with the inscription "Tevzemai
un Brivibai" and was happy to discover I understood Latvian:
Obviously Fatherland and Freedom with characteristic IE dative
suffix.
3 Roumania "Eroilor Revolutiei ...", Germany "Unseren Gefallenen".
Every time people die for a country, there seems to be a dative
implicated. Datives make me nervous.
Torsten