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

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)