Spitfire wrote:Hi again.
Been watching Jackson Crawford on you tube regarding old norse and a particular point confused me.
In his video explaining how to say I love you he says it is spoken as ek ann þér.
However what confused me is that the structure of the sentence as I understood it was that I (subject) and you (object). Therefore shouldn't that make it ek ann þik?
If not, and I accept I'm am wrong, why?
It is this that confuses me as þér is the dative for you whereas þik is the accusative for you which I understood you would use in a sentence where 'you' was the object.
Hope this makes sense. Thanks.
You'll basically just have to think of it as an idiomatic expression that isn't an exact, word-for-word translation for the expression in English. The verb
unna (from which
ann comes) has come to mean "to love", but it requires the use of the dative case. This is because the original meaning of
unna was "to bestow" or "to grant". (It kept that meaning in addition to the meaning of "to love").
So when someone says "ek ann þér" they are actually saying "I bestow upon you" or "I grant to you" and it's understood that this actually means "I bestow
love upon you", "I grant
love to you".
ek I
ann grant, bestow (1st person singular of
unna)
þér upon you, to you (dative of
þú)
This meaning of "to you" or "upon you" requires the dative case, not accusative.
If you want to avoid this you can also say
ek elska þik for "I love you" using the verb
elska, which works just the way you expected it to, using the verb
elska "to love" and the accusative case.
ek I
elska love (1st person singular of
elska)
þik you [as a direct object] (accusative of
þú)
edit: corrected a typo