Students: Verbs that Take the Dative

[Cato]

List of verbs that commonly take a dative object:

cedo - yield
credo - believe
diffido - distrust
displiceo - displease
evenio - happen, occur
faveo - favor
fido (confido) - trust
ignosco - pardon
impero - command, order
indulgeo - indulge
invideo - envy
irascor - be angry at
minor (minitor) - threaten
noceo - harm
parco - spare
pareo - obey
placeo - please
resisto - resist
respondeo - answer
servio - serve
studeo - be eager, desire
suadeo (persuadeo) - exhort, recommend, persuade

Dative with Compounds of Intransitive Verbs

subvenio - support
Compounds of sum, e.g. prosum, adsum, absum...

***If anyone has others to add, feel free.***


The verbs above can take an object which modern English speakers perceive as a direct object, one we therefore expect in the accusative in Latin. But these verbs are actually intransitive in Latin, and this object is placed in the dative.

Note that these verbs--because they are technically intransitive--also behave somewhat differently than expected in the passive. Specifically, they must be used impersonally, with any expressed subject placed in the dative (or ablative of agent if there would be ambiguity). For example: Favet nobis - "He favors us" could be written passively as Nobis favetur - "It is favorable for us". But Deus favet - "God favors" could also be written as a passive impersonal Deo favetur - "it is favorable to God," so to avoid ambiguity one might instead write A Deo favetur.

 

[Cato]

So, why are these verbs intransitive in Latin when they seem transitive in English?

In a broad sense, the dative is used to indicate someone who is "interested" or "involved" in the action. Thus, you generally put people/living creatures in the dative case, not things (unless you are deliberately personifying a thing). There are exceptions--especially for abstract nouns, and poetry is its own category--but it's a good general notion.

Now look more closely at that list of verbs. Notice that many of these can take both a person or a thing as a "direct object" in English, sometimes with a slight shift in meaning. You can believe a person, but you can also believe a statement, idea, etc. You can envy a person, or you can envy their clothes, house, etc. A judge often spares a convict, but there is also the expression "spare the rod". You may yield to an opponent, or yield the floor to an opponent.

If you take some time comparing many of these verbs, you find that the object of the "action" isn't as much the person as it is a thing/idea that is closely related with a person (e.g. "I believe you" = "I believe your statements"; "I envy you" = "I envy your clothes"; "I spare you" = "I spare you the details").

There's another factor at work. Many of these actions--"sparing", "favoring", "desiring", "believing"--are apparent only if the person feeling/thinking them tells us. This is a little different from, say, laedo, which means "harm" but more basically means "injure, strike", a readily apparent action with an obvious, personal, and direct object being struck. With speech-related verbs, it's easy to see that the "him" in a sentence like "I'll tell him" is an indirect object (i.e. a Latin dative) even though it looks like a direct object (An example of this sentence with a direct object would be "I'll tell him the answer).

A similar thing is going on with these verbs; in the English sentence "I envy him," "him" looks like (and for all English intents and purposes might as well be called) a direct object. Latin, however, is more precise; in order to indicate envy (it isn't called the indicative mood for nothing), you usually have to tell someone. These verbs then are related more to an internal state of the speaker, which explains why (1) compounds of sum will often take a dative, e.g. adsum tibi - "I'm there for you", and (2) why verbs like parco/noceo/studeo tibi are often translated "I am lenient/harmful/eager to/for you".

So to summarize, these verbs have two tendencies that explain why an object would be in the dative: (1) Persons which look like direct objects in English are really only related to the actual object of the action, which is commonly a thing or idea, and (2) the verbs express a speaker's internal state, and so are related to speech verbs like dico that naturally take an indirect object of the person. I'm not saying the tibi in parce tibi is an indirect object the same way it is in Dic tibi, but they are closely related concepts.

The real exceptions then are verbs like laedo - "harm" and delecto - "please"; though synonyms for words in the list above, both take standard accusative direct objects of the person. A closer look at their meaning explains the discrepancy; laedo has already been dealt with, and if you look thru the definitions for delecto, you find things like "lure, entice". These words belie delecto's relation to lego - "pick, gather", and when this action is described as "please" it is afar more overt kind of "pleasing" than in the superficially similar placeo.

 

[scrabulista]

On that I (prithee, Lord/pray thee, Lord/pray the Lord) my soul to keep thread -- I was thinking that "Lord" was close to dative (if they called it that in English) but I translated it accusative.

Can the dative objects take an infinitive?

 

[Nikolaos]

Thanks for bumping this, I'll take these down now.

 

[Bitmap]

Hello!

The word you used there was orare which is constructed with an accusative.
In the meaning "to ask someone to do something" it should be followed by an ut. However, a few non-classical authors also seem to attach AcIs.

 

[scrabulista]

I was pointing out the difference between "praying a prayer" and "pray thee/prithee." Does the hard copy Lewis and Short use Greek letters for third level definitions?
oro + ut is in II.B.(d) but then before that is II.B.(g). Anyway when the construction is used, it looks to be accusative whether you're praying the person or the thing.

EDIT: It must. After II.B.(d) comes II.B.(ε), up to II.B.(λ)

 

[cinefactus]

The OLD gives examples of both, mostly with ut, but some from Vergil, Tacitus and Suetonius for Acc + Infin. The one being beseeched always being acc. The Vulgate uses ut

 

[Imber Ranae]

Yeah, oro is one of those double accusative words, like rogo: one accusative is of the thing prayed for, the other accusative of the person prayed to/entreated. Usually the thing is just a neuter pronoun, like id or hoc, or replaced entirely by an ut substantive clause (or ne).