I like this - it would be nice if I didn't have to convey all this, but I do think that I have to say about this much to cover the basic range of examples I see in the GNT. A slight majority of the examples I'm pulling up with simple searches seem to be locative rather than "true dative", and I don't want to present an explanation that doesn't address most cases. The sample may be skewed by the set of nouns that I am using in the searches, which are the 10 most common second declension nouns in the GNT, and largely have to do with God, Christ, Jesus, etc. - the examples I found using pronouns had a much higher percentage of pure datives. Most of these locatives have EN or other indications, but there are also locatives without other indications.
Both Smyth and Robertson point out a cool trick for determining whether an object is a direct object or an indirect object: if you make the verb passive, the direct object becomes the subject, and the subject becomes the direct object - the object that remains an object was the indirect object. In other words, if I say: "I gave her the book", and I want to know what kind of objects "her" and "the book" are, I can put it into passive: "the book was given to her by me".
The original subject, "I", becomes a direct object, "me".
The original direct object, "the book", becomes the subject.
The indirect object, "her", remains an object.
This seems to work pretty well as long as we are dealing with transitive verbs. Daniel Wallace says that indirect objects cannot occur with intransitive verbs, but I am not sure that this is true - in the sentence "I live for him", "him" seems to be an indirect object, isn't it? And you seem to indicate that intransitive verbs can have indirect objects in this statement:
>As for the sentence above, one way to explain it is by saying that
>DOULEUEIN is an intransitive verb that doesn't take a direct object, since
>it means "be a servant"; then you can say "be a servant TO Lord Christ" or
>"be a servant FOR Lord Christ." I would add, however, that even this is
>only a stopgap. At some point one needs to get through that both datives
>and accusatives can serve as DIRECT COMPLEMENTS to verbs, and perhaps get
>away from the notion of an "object" that "receives" an action; one needs a
>"structural" rather than a "syntactic" definition of these case usages. But
>that's a much bigger question, and I broach it here only because the usage
>of dative with the verb--even of a "true" dative, are more complicated than
>the notion of an indirect object can indicate.
This is a useful warning. And it might be worth pointing out that if you can identify the controlling verb, you can look it up in BAGD, which generally points out the cases associated with particular complements.
Hey, waitaminit! *I* am the guy who is teaching these people verbs, and if it were helpful, I could decide to teach complements along with the verbs. We do this with prepositions:
DIA+Genitive = through
DIA+Accusative = on account of
Perhaps we should also do this with verbs, or at least with some verbs, when we introduce them:
PISTEUW + Accusative complement = "believe that"
PISTEUW + Dative complement = "believe in"
Do you think this would be helpful for beginners, or would it just be overwhelming?
>At some point early in the
>learning of Greek one needs to become familiar with the Dative of
>Possession: one can make a stopgap translation of EMOI ESTI BIBLION as
>"there is to me a book." EMOI is unquestionably a "true" dative here, but
>it is not an indirect object and "there is to me a book" is not normal
>English; one needs to learn that this means "I have a book."
What a can of worms. Of course, "there is a book [belonging] to me" *is* normal English, and might be helpful for getting the idea across.
>So one needs to go step by step in teaching and learning, but
>also one needs to have a certain amount of humility about the fact that it
>really is a FOREIGN language one is learning or teaching--and also about
>the fact that learning the FOREIGN language entails learning things about
>one's native language that one wasn't really very well aware of if at all.
Ultimately, I think that exposure to the language is the best way to learn a language, but you need some help to get to the point that you can expose yourself to a language. Unfortunately, I find that it is fairly easy to write an explanation of a grammatical point that makes perfect sense, but which does not fit the data. I have found this several times in writing chapters for Little Greek 101 - the structure of each chapter requires lots of GNT examples at the end, and I often find that my grammatical explanation needs to be changed when I get these examples in front of me. This may be true even after pulling my original explanations fairly directly from elementary textbooks. I find the intermediate textbooks much more likely to give a true and useful explanation - but I am somewhat afraid that I may wind up writing an intermediate textbook for beginners, and that the resulting explanation would simply be overwhelming.
Jonathan