When to use the dative with the word 'like'

Latin Learning Latin
1

In the english sentence:

I like to use

I: subject
like: verb
to: prep
use: verb

Look at these two english sentences before they translate into Roman:

  1. It is an animal like a dog
  2. Dogs like to bark

In sentence #1 the verb is ‘is’ - like denotes that things ‘are like each other’
In sentence #2 the verb is ‘like’ - like denotes ‘to like something’

in sentence #2 ‘to’ is not a prep it is part of the infinitive
Neither of these two sentences takes the dative

Why is that?

the noun ‘dog’ was specified and so was the verb ‘like’ which qualifies
as taking the dative

i am missing something about when to use the dative

what is the difference between sentence #1-2 and the sentence
‘a location suitable for the temple’ which takes the dative

thanks

2

Who ever said that they should in English? // Quis ubicunquè est qui sic anglicè dicat?

The LATIN word “similis” takes either the genitive or the dative case.
“Similis” verbum casui genetivo vel dativo servit latiné.

3

I think the key thing here is that you need to learn Latin divorced from English, if that makes any sense. One can easily make sense of Latin by analogy with English constructions, but just as often analogy with English can betray you. IT is best to simply learn the Latin rules.

The dative case is essentially used as an indirect object. In most cases it can be understood this way.
It is often translated into English using the prepositions ‘to’ and ‘for’, but it is a FATAL mistake to fail to understand the variety of uses of these two words in English. ‘To’ and ‘for’ serve multipe uses in English, many of which simply do not correspond to the Latin dative.
For example, ‘I give the book to my friend’ is a Dative because there is a transfer of something from someone to someone else.
‘I like to walk.’ is not a Dative because there is no transfer. This corresponds to the Latin infinitive.
‘I came here to eat.’ is not a Dative NOR an infinitive but would be rendered by any number of Latin constructions implying purpose.

The simplest way to understand the Dative is to think of transfer. One thing is transferred from one person to another.
I give an apple to my friend.

We can also see the idea of an action being done for someone’s benefit.
I made the bridge for Caesar.

There are also verbs which substitute a DAtive for an accusative as their direct object. However, if we translate many of these verbs litereally, the idea of transfer is still clear.
credo = I give trust to someone
faveo = I give favour to someone
parco = I give leniency to someone etc.

4

There are also examples of adjectives that will be followed by Datives in Latin. DO NOT attempt to learn these by thinking of the words ‘to’ or ‘for’ in English. As often as not they do not use these words in English, and other adjectives which do not take the DAtive often WILL use ‘to’ and ‘for’ in English.

similis is followed by the dative if dealing with a thing, genitive with a person.

what is the difference between sentence #1-2 and the sentence
‘a location suitable for the temple’ which takes the dative

You’ve answered your own question. The difference is that it TAKES THE DATIVE and the others do not. What more is there to need to know than that. It follows Latin rules. Latin demands a Dative after ‘idoneus’, a Genitive or Dative after ‘similis’, and an Infinitive after the verb ‘amo’.

Furthermore, there are multiple ways to translate ‘The dog likes to bark’ into Latin.
canis latrare amat. Infinitive
canis latrandi cupidus est. Gerund
placet cani latrare. Infinitive with impersonal verb placet.
etc.

I recommend the book ‘Latin Sentence and Idiom’ by R. Colebourn, which is an excellent overview of Latin Composition and the often confusing overlap of English constructions.

5
  1. It is an animal like a dog
  2. Dogs like to bark
    …
    Neither of these two sentences takes the dative

Actually like does use the dative in the first example, but the preposition “to” is not included:

It is an animal like (to) a dog (= “It is an animal similar to a dog”).



If you use the elder and impersonal usage of the verb “like”, it would use the dative too:

Dogs likes to bark (=“to dogs it is pleasing to bark”)
Them likes to bark (=“To them it is pleasing to bark”).
Dogs bark when it likes them. (“…when it is pleasing to them”)



6

let me see if i get this straight

the dative is associated with ‘transfer’ from one thing to another
however this does not involve the special list of adjectives which
take the dative: suitable, fit, useful, like, unlike, friendly, unfriendly,
pleasing, equal, near, neightbor

Question: When using special case adjectives like ‘like’ which take the
dative must there be transfer?

Question: If the sentence

It is an animal like a dog

really takes the dative because ‘like’ qualifies under a special list
then the original post was wrong

it can also be concluded in general that direct corelation of ‘to’ and
‘for’ between english and latin languages is unpredictable

thanks.

7

Quatsch. None of the examples of ‘like’ which you give are standard modern English.

It is legitimate to say that we can find constructions in English for the word “like” (both the adjective and verb) which imitate the usage of their Latin equivalents (i.e., they are followed by a dative). This does NOT mean that there is anything inherently dative-ish about the use of the English word(s) “like”.

When we speak of ‘case’ (such as the dative), we are describing certain morphological or syntactical relationships. Not meaning. Meaning does play a role, but generally semantic elements (say, possession) are not restricted to a single grammatical construction – they can be expressed in multiple ways. This is true for English as well as Latin.

8

what you are saying is that you cannot rely on english to roman direct translation to answer the question

then i suppose wouldnt it be an iron rule to say that the use of ‘like’ in any roman sentence uses the
dative no matter what since it is on the list of roman words which take the dative with additional nouns
which also depend on the adjective

is it a rule then: all sentences which use the word ‘like’ use the dative

thanks

9

What I’m saying is

  1. it is of limited value to speak of a dative case in English (we don’t have a system of endings the same way that Latin does, although there are equivalent syntactical constructions)
  2. the English word “like” has several very different usages. There is no one Latin word which can translate all of them.
  3. Some of the Latin words which can translate into English as “like” (the adj. ‘similis’, the verb ‘placet’) REQUIRE the dative. But this is connected to the particular word, not to the meaning of “like”.
  4. Using English examples to illustrate dative use of particular Latin word is (at best) likely to cause confusion.
10

Remember, as Spiphany says, ‘like’ has many uses in English. It can be an adjective, verb, etc.

Don’t worry too much about the English. Work out what the English MEANS then use a Latin construction that corresponds in MEANING.
Every language CAN correspond to another language in word for word translation, but very few will do this consistently. Work out what something MEANS then translate the MEANING into another language.

Spiphany, I don’t think Essorant was saying that those sentences were proper English. I think he was just writing equivalents to the Latin constructions to show his point.

blutoonwithcarrotandnail wrote:what you are saying is that you cannot rely on english to roman direct translation to answer the question

NEVER! This is the worst way to translate. MEANING is what we carry across, not words.

11

Who looks beyond modern English will see that the “object” of the adjective in such examples was always the dative, originally indicated by the dative inflexion in English, and later showed with “to” and then often with “to” omitted. The adjective takes an “object”, because the object is dative: He is like (to) him, not he is like he. Another adjective that has similar usage is nigh/near/next. These as well take a dative object that may or may not include the “to”: He is near (to) him, not he is near he. I wasn’t trying to say that the dative usage of the verb “like” was modern, but that its original usage was with the dative. Originally one said “Him likes…”, not “He likes…”, indicating dative with inflexion -m of him.

The point is that the English adjective and the verb like have a long tradition of dativeness as well in English, regardless of how ignorant modern speakers are of it.

12

You are right about the construction “like to” in your later, unquoted, post. I.e. in Revelations, “These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire”. And from Sir Walter Ralegh; “Like to a hermit poor in place obscure…” I also found that the original meaning of the verb “like” means “pleases”, not “find pleasing”, so that where we say “I like it”, as in “I find it pleasing”, it originally would have been “It likes me”, as in “It pleases me”. But I’ve never seen anything like the constructions you give above, with the apparently inappropriate tense and case. Do you have any examples that you can cite, or are these translated from Old English?

13

“A, madame, mercy.” quod I “Me liketh well your words”

-Piers Plowman


“Him liketh nevere yit to sein
A goodly word to mi plesance”

-Confessio Amantis



It is just as “Me thinks”, “(to) me (it) seems” which sometimes uses the pronoun “it” as well.

14

OK. Interesting. I wonder if this construction has something to do with the fact I mentioned before, about the old usage being “It likes me” (as in “It pleases me”), not “I like it”. (I found this on the Online Etymology Dictionary, BTW.) Take the sentence “Me liketh well your words”, and flip them around into “Your words well liketh me”. That would be the old word order, with the same general meaning, “Your words please me”. If at some point in Middle English, the order got reversed to the more modern “Me liketh well your words”, but the case had not yet changed to the modern usage (“I liketh well your words”), that would explain it. (That’s pure speculation, I’ll admit.) And in this sentence, there certainly is a vestigial bit of some case in the “me”, but it seems more accusative. Also, in “Dogs likes to bark” = “To bark likes dogs” = “To bark pleases dogs” (if my above theory is correct), the “dogs” is the direct object, which would be accusative, no?

I’m not sure that a sentence like “It is an animal like a dog” has any dative in it, either. Even if you take it as “It is an animal like to a dog”, I’m not sure the “to” signifies a dative here. It certainly doesn’t signify an indirect object. It seems like a plain old prepositional phrase to me.

In short, I don’t think either of blutoonwithcarrotandnail’s original sentences have any dative in them, even vestigially.

Your unusual parsings of English have convinced me that using grammatical terms from Latin to describe English grammar is potentially confusing, at best.

15

None of these older usages have the accusative, Lex. That is what makes them like the Latin: they are dative. The impersonal usage usually comes more to mind for me, but as you suggest, there are examples where it is not used impersonally. But the person that is “pleased” (liked), is always in the dative case.

Here are some examples that are not impersonal, from Aelfric’s Colloquy:

Eala, cild, hu eow licaþ þeos spæc?
“Lo!, children, how you likes this speech? (How likeable to you/how pleases you…)”

Wel heo licaþ us
"Well she (=it) likes us. " (spæc is a feminine noun)

Two from Beowulf:

Me þin modsefa
licaþ leng swa wel, leofa Beowulf.
“Me thy courage likes (pleases) so well (the) longer, lief Beowulf.”

þam wife þa word wel licodon
“The wife the words well liked (=the words pleased the wife well)”



Here some more impersonal examples with “it” either implied or used with the verb:


From Mathew (17:5):

Her ys min leofa sunu on þam me wel gelicaþ
"Here is my dear son, in whom me well likes (I am well pleased)

From Mathew (14:6):

Þa on Herodes gebyrddæge tumbude þære Herodiadiscean dohtur beforan him & hit licode Herode
Then on Herod’s birthday Herodias daughter danced before him and it liked (pleased) Herod.

ic eom mihtig mid worde swa eall to donne, and anra gehwilcum to æteowenne swa swa me licað.
I am mighty with word as to do all, and to appear to every man just as me likes. (as “it” pleases me)



In þe londe by þe forest
þere hem likeþ wonying best.

In the land by the forest
Where them likes dwelling best.

-Kyng Alisaunder


For his absence wepeth she and siketh
As do thise noble wives when hem liketh.

(hem = “them”)

Chaucer, The Franklin’s Prologue

me lykeþ nat to lye
“me likes not to lie”

-Troybook


16

Essorant,

This is all well and good for Old English. I won’t dispute what you have written, because I’m not an expert on Old English. This is all beside the point, though, because Old English is not Modern English. Modern English has only a vestigial combined accusative/dative case left, if you take the word “case” in its strict sense of a declension of a noun, pronoun, etc. So, “me”, “them”, “whom”, etc., is a combined “objective” case, for when the pronoun is used as a direct or indirect object. For the rest of the language, we have the indirect object instead of the dative case.

Even this is all beside the point, though, because in the two original sentences, there is no such objective pronoun. Also, there is no word that is used as an indirect object.

  1. It is an animal like a dog.

Here, “like a dog” is a prepositional phrase that modifies the word “animal”. There is no dative, and no indirect object.

  1. Dogs like to bark.

Here, “like” is the verb, and “to bark” is again neither dative nor an indirect object.

If you translate these sentences into Old English, they very well may use a dative. This is completely irrelevant. Applying the categories of archaic forms of languages, or of foreign languages, when analyzing / parsing modern languages, is pointless and misleading.

17

I don’t know if we see an indirect object in “similis cani” either. No one is giving the dog something as far as I may see. Therefore what is the difference? Just because English and Latin are very different doesn’t mean they don’t have parallels in some things. To me this looks like one. Both “similis cani” and “Like (to) a dog” bear a greatest likeness in sense and grammatical manner. Saying that they don’t to me is what seems pointless and misleading.

To me “a dog” in “like a dog” is a dative the same way “go” is still an infintive in “I will go”. The infintive “go” in “I will go” is obviously not indicated by an inflexion. But is known in the light of knowing the relationship of such verbs in grammatical tradition. Likewise examples such as “like a dog” are dative not by inflexion, but by relationship and the grammatical tradition of them being dative.

18

I am not well-schooled in Latin, so help me out here. I am assuming that “cani” is the dative form of “canis”, and that “similis cani” is a fairly strict translation of “like (to) a dog”? If so, no, there is not an indirect object in “similis cani”, but there is a dative. But there is no dative in the strict sense in the English “like (to) a dog”, since there is no dative declension of “dog” here (or in the English language at all). The only declensions of “dog” in English are “dog”, “dogs”, “dog’s” and "dogs’ ", which could be labeled as nominative singular and plural, and genitive singular and plural; none could be reasonably labeled as dative. (You could call “dog” a combined nominative /dative /vocative /accusative case, but this would only serve to point out the ridiculousness of trying to force-fit the square peg of English into the round hole of Latin. Why not add /instrumental /locative /ablative to force-fit English into the triangular hole of Sanskrit?) Even in the loose sense of dative as “functioning as an indirect object”, there is still no dative in “like (to) a dog”, because there is no indirect object here; it’s just a prepositional phrase. Yes, “similis cani” and “like (to) a dog” are similar in meaning. They are not so similar in grammatical manner, because the English phrase is not dative in either a strict or loose sense, while the Latin phrase is in the strict sense. One should not say that “like (to) a dog” is dative in any sense, just because the phrase as translated into Latin is. One should analyze “like (to) a dog” without reference to Latin, or even to Old English. They are distinct languages, with distinct grammars. They should be analyzed as such.

(I could even make a case that Old English, from a linguistic point of view, could be considered a distinct language from Modern English. After all, if you used a time machine to bring a speaker of Old English to the present time, communication with an average speaker of Modern English would not be possible. They are mutually unintelligible, hence if not connected genetically, would be considered separate languages.)

19

You must have edited your post after I started responding to it. I missed this part, at any rate.

I don’t consider the “go” in “I will go” as infinitive, either. I consider it, in this context, as part of a “complex verb” or “verb phrase” that is future in tense; “will go”. “Grammatical tradition” is interesting enough in its own right, but it is not necessary for analyzing modern usage. Modern English, taken from a scientific, linguistic point of view, is that language which is spoken by modern speakers, the great majority of whom neither know nor care anything about “grammatical tradition”. It is what it is, and should be analyzed as what it is, not as what it is not, nor as what it used to be. It does indeed have predecessor languages, but does not “contain” those predecessor languages in some sort of linguistic DNA. It should be taken as it is, and analyzed as it is, otherwise one runs the risk of trying to force-fit it into categories that do not properly apply to it, as I believe you have been doing.

20

I think that both of you guys have points.

I think essorant is not worried too much about whether we call it a dative. I think he is simply pointing to the usefulness of the analogy between ‘similis cani’ and ‘like (to) a dog’. Here is a situation where the English can be rendered in a manner that is similar enough to Latin to be useful as a teaching tool. We may call it a dative or not in English, but that is beside the point.

In the example of ‘I will go’, again we may call ‘go’ an infinitive or not, and you are both correct from your perspectives (Essorant says it is historically an infinitive, Lex says it no longer acts like an infinitive) but in either case it is not a useful example for teaching Latin by analogy. Clearly the ‘go’ in ‘I will go’ does not correspond at all to the Latin infinitive, but to the Latin future tense.

Lex Wrote:
Modern English, taken from a scientific, linguistic point of view, is that language which is spoken by modern speakers, the great majority of whom neither know nor care anything about “grammatical tradition”.

This is kind of a funny line, Lex: very true, but one could counter with the fact that the vast majority of English speakers don’t know or care anything about grammar at all, never mind if it is Old English origins or current rules. :slight_smile: