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

[zauberer.livejournal.com]

It is entirely possible to say "Я не смогу" instead of "Мне не [смочь]". Usage of dative in these construction in Russian is somewhat irregular, that means that there's no justification for it in modern grammar. It was justified, however, in ancient times (I don't know for sure in what period of development of Russian language, sorry), when ergative constructions were widely used.

[andrey-bessonov.livejournal.com]

If I'm not terribly mistaken, these are impersonal sentences, so they don't have a subject. A subject is always in the nominative case. Here it's the dative.

P.S. Your examples with the nominative are perfectly okay.

[slovami.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this has any bearing on reality, but I always think of them like,

"What is there for me to feed my family with?" / "Feeding my family on these wages is impossible for me."

Sounds awkward in English, but gives my poor little brain an explanation for why it's dative. :)

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

And on many occasions creating such phrases is the only way to get your brain to accept a foreign construction, which is possibly the first step toward understanding it ;-) I also do it all the time.

[ukechandesuyo.livejournal.com]

oh hi~ i'm not really commenting to answer your question but rather ask you a question. what compound is the structure on your user pic? OuO

[miconazole.livejournal.com]

Miconazole ;)

[rainydaymary.livejournal.com]

i knew Russian was difficult, but i didn't think it was as difficult as organic chemistry ...

[rainydaymary.livejournal.com]

does it get you high?

[un-malpaso.livejournal.com]

A short explanation in terms of English that might clarify it, is that the Dative is translated as English "for" (rather in the sense of "as for", "in the case of") instead of "to."
Then, in the first sentence, the infinitive represents kind of a subjunctive future sense
It's a colloquial construction, that could be directly translated as
"with what [i.e. how], in my case/as for me, to feed [will I feed] my family?"

[un-malpaso.livejournal.com]

LOL!
(speaking as one who failed organic chemistry miserably before he changed his major to Russian... and actually got A's in it! Thus are linguists and chemists efficiently sorted out early in the educational process :)

[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".

[miconazole.livejournal.com]

It clears up your athlete's foot x)