Scribo epistulam ad patrem tuum?

Latin Learning Latin
1

For Lingua Latina, the chapter where Marcus gets reprimanded for answering wrongly and being a bad student.

Shouldn’t patri tuoo be used instead, I thought the dative should be used? I read somewhere that the use of the accusative in cases like this is an innovation of post-Antiquity Latin and a step towards the Romance languages. I think the dative would be better here, to be more precise about who gets the letter?

2

It’s idiomatic, but the thought behind it is that it will be sent to his father. This thought is actually fairly concrete, but you normally see this construction concerning letter writing. There’s definitely precedent.