• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Do you know German? The “I am cold” one is interesting to me. “Mir” is German for “me” or “to me” roughly, right? So, would a rough literal translation be something like “to me it is cold”?

    I tried to learn some German at some point, but I didn’t manage to learn enough to get comfortable with the various cases.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        That’s really interesting, thanks for the detailed answer. I never learned Latin. Instead I learned French and Spanish. So, I only know the descendants of Latin.

        Also cool how Latin has a verb for “to be angry”, etc. English has “to anger” but that’s to make someone else angry. I wonder why languages lost that form, because it seems really useful to have a single verb for those.

    • YTG123@sopuli.xyz
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      11 months ago

      I’m pretty sure it’s called the dative experiencer, and many other languages also do something similar (sometimes using prepositions in absence of case, but the point being that the same grammar used to denote the indirect object of verbs like “give” is also used here)