Dative?

[miconazole.livejournal.com]

Hi everyone!

A while back someone posted "Чем мне кормить мою семью" and "Мне не прокормить семью на эту зарплату" as translations for "How can I feed my family" and "I can't feed my family with these wages." Now I must have missed some major concept in Russian grammar because I often see constructions like these and I don't get why it's мне and not я. Can you enlighten me? :)

PS Is it possible to use the nominative in these sentences and still get the same meaning? e.g. "Я не смогу прокормить семью..." or is that horribly awkward or something?

Edit: Thanks! :DD

Comments

[kunaifusu.livejournal.com]

This is a kind of passive voice. It may not be only Dative, depending on the verbs used it can be any case an object can take e.g.
Меня пугает международная напряженность. - Accusative
Со мной случилось несчастье! - Instrumental
О мне написали в газете. - Prepositional
У меня есть дом. - Genitive
I am saying "kind of" because formally it is not, formally it's an active voice sentence where logical object and subject are interchanged. Proper passive voice is rare and awkward so this way you can express the same thing much smoother.

[kunaifusu.livejournal.com]

There are no examples here where a pronoun denotes the doer of the action while being in non-Nominative case.

[oryx_and_crake]

"о мне" is wrong. It should be "обо мне".