Dative Case

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given. For example, in "John gave Mary a book". The name is derived from the Latin casus dativus, meaning "the case appropriate to giving", this was in turn modelled on the Greek , from its use with the verb (didónai) "to give". The thing being given may be a tangible object, such as "a book" or "a pen", or it may be an intangible abstraction, such as "an answer" or "help". The dative generally marks the indirect object of a verb, although in some instances the dative is used for the direct object of a verb pertaining directly to an act of giving something. In Russian, for example, the verb 'to call' [by telephone] is always followed by a noun in the dative. In some languages the dative case has assimilated the functions of other now-extinct cases. In Scottish Gaelic and Irish, the term dative case is misleadingly used in traditional grammars to refer to the prepositional case-marking of nouns following simple prepositions and the definite article.... Mehr