Re: TRANSLATION: Grandfather and the dragon

Sally Caves said, to Taliesin:

>But I thought your Beneficiary was an oblique case like a dative.  In
>Tokana, I think you say:  To me feels blue ("I'm feeling blue").  It's
>an awful lot like the OE impersonal verbs (which I thing derive from
>a similar construction):  "It rues to me."  I regret something.  "It
>seems to me."  I think.  But perhaps I misunderstand your BEN.
I don't know whether you misunderstand his BEN or not, but you have
your Tokana correct.  With a small number of exceptions, the dative case
is used to mark the experiencer participants of verbs of thinking, knowing,
and feeling.  So:  "To-me knows that...", "To-me thinks that...", etc..
"To-me is hot" means "I feel hot".  The dative is also used to mark
possessors:  "To-me is a book" means "I have a book".

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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