The Old English language, current until approximately sometime after the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, had a dative case ; however, the English case system gradually fell into disuse during the Middle English period, when in pronouns the accusative and dative merged into a single oblique case that was also used for all prepositions.

It survives in this fixed form from the days of Old English ( having undergone, however, phonetic changes with the rest of the language ), in which it was constructed as "" + " me " ( the dative case of the personal pronoun ) + " thinks " ( i. e., " seems ", < Old English thyncan, " to seem ", a verb closely related to the verb thencan, " to think ", but distinct from it in Old English ; later it merged with " think " and lost this meaning ).

The major change in nominal morphology was the loss of the dative case ( its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ); in the verb, the major change was the loss of the infinitive, with a concomitant rise in new periphrastic forms.

It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases ( nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental ), three grammatical numbers ( singular, plural, and dual ) and three grammatical genders ( masculine, feminine, and neuter ).

The instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular ; it could typically be replaced by the dative.

Thus in this example, the ergative is promoted to the absolutive, and the agent ( i. e. him ), which was formerly marked by the absolutive, is deleted to form the antipassive voice ( or is marked in a different way, in the same way that in the English passive voice can still be specified as the agent of the action using by him in I was hugged by him — for example, Dyirbal puts the agent in the dative case, and Basque retains the agent in the absolutive ).

In archaic times, the locative singular of third declension nouns was actually interchangeable between ablative and dative forms, but in the Augustan Period the use of the ablative form became fixed.

The locative case had merged with the dative in early Germanic times and was no longer distinct in Proto-Germanic or in any of its descendants.

The dative did, however, contrast with the accusative case, which was used to indicate motion toward a place ( it had an allative meaning ).

One, at Lancaster, was dedicated ( in the dative ) to Deo Ialono Contre Sanctissimo (" to the holiest god Ialonus Contre "); another, at Overborough in Kirkby Lonsdale, to Deo San Gontrebi (" to the holy god Gontrebis ").

The name Southall derives from the Anglo-Saxon dative æt súð healum, " At the south corner ( of the land or wood )" and súð heal, " South corner " and separates it from Northolt which was originally norþ heal, " North corner " which through a later association with Anglo-Saxon holt, " Wood, copse " developed into Northolt.

The Leatherhead Museum has traced the history of the town from its beginnings in about AD 880 when it was known as Leodridan ( dative case of a compound of " leode " and " rida "), meaning " place where people ride the river " in Anglo-Saxon ).

The Old Norse form of the name was Øyja ( accusative case and dative case ) which comes from the word Øyi ( nominative case ).

The municipality ( originally the parish ) is named after the Førde farm ( Old Norse Fjǫrðr nominative and Firði dative ) since the first church was built there.

Declension was greatly simplified during the Middle English period, when the accusative and dative cases of the pronouns merged into a single oblique case that also replaced the genitive case after prepositions.

The English language borough, like the Scots Burgh, is derived from the same Old English language word burh ( whose dative singular and nominative / accusative plural form byrig sometimes underlies modern place-names, and which had dialectal variants including " burg "; it was also sometimes confused with beorh, beorg, ' mound, hill ', on which see Hall 2001, 69-70 ).

The Inscription of Alba Fucus is a bronze plate inscribed with ALBSI PATRE .< ref > gives the CIL number, as the inscription was originally taken to be early Latin: CIL I < sup > 2 </ sup > 385, VI 3672, IX 4177 .</ ref > Conway reconstructs the first word as * albe ( n ) si, a dative case.

In Middle English the nominative case became ye, and the oblique case ( formed by the merger of the accusative case and the former dative case ) was you.

It was named Erriapo in August 2003 after Erriapus, a giant in Gaulish mythology ; the name was changed from dative Erriapo to nominative Erriapus per IAU conventions in late 2007.

It is probable that the English version was taken from what was a " dative " context, such as (" May I stay in Ireland for ever ") or (" May I go back to Ireland for ever ").

In languages which mark grammatical case, it is common to differentiate the objects of a ditransitive verb using, for example, the accusative case for the direct object, and the dative case for the indirect object ( but this morphological alignment is not unique ; see below ).

* The Ukrainian language, in common with all Slavic languages other than Russian, Slovak and Slovene has retained the Common Slavic dative & locative endings-ce ,-ze, and-se in the female declension.

Irish has four cases: common ( usually called nominative, but it covers the role of an accusative as well ), vocative, genitive, and dative.

The origin of the term is an archaic dative plural form of lag (" law "), in this case referring not necessarily to judicial law but common sense law.

This replacement of the nominative by the dative is common among Irish feminine and some masculine nouns of the second and fifth declensions, and is most widespread in the two dialect areas mentioned .< ref >

The dative construction is very common in Georgian.

The dative construction is also a separate class of verbs ( Class IV ) which have the semantics of experience, cognitive processes, and possession ( all common DAT-construction predicates in languages which have them ).

A common translation is " As a ( dative of purpose ) to ( dative of reference ).

A few exceptions exist which are optionally or obligatorily inflected for case, including certain kinship terms ( tate ' father ', mame ' mother ') and the word harts ' heart '; among these, masculine nouns take the ending-n in the accusative and dative singular, and feminine and neuter nouns take-n only in the dative singular.

The dative plural of Attic-Ionic had-oisi, which appears in early Attic but simplifies to-ois in later ": anthropois " to or for the men ".

In traditional grammars, and in scholarly treatments of the early language, the term dative case is incorrectly used for the prepositional case.

Absolute constructions occur with other grammatical cases in Indo-European languages, such as accusative absolute, ablative absolute in Latin, dative absolute in Gothic and Old Church Slavonic, and locative absolute in Vedic Sanskrit.

In some languages, the dative case has assimilated the functions of other now-extinct cases.

Under the influence of English, which uses the preposition " to " for both indirect objects ( give to ) and directions of movement ( go to ), the term " dative " has sometimes been used to describe cases that in other languages would more appropriately be called lative.

Other Semitic languages like Arabic and Aramaic have the prepositions bi / bə and li / lə ( locative and dative, respectively ).

This difference in meaning between dative and accusative is present in all of the old Germanic languages and survives in all Germanic languages that retain a distinction between the two cases.

In Latin and many other languages, the direct object is marked by the accusative case, while the indirect object is typically marked by the dative case.

In dative languages, the direct object is promoted, while in dechticaetiative languages the primary object is promoted.

However, the term oblique is also used for languages without a nominative case, such as ergative – absolutive languages ; in the Northwest Caucasian languages, for example, the oblique-case marker serves to mark the ergative, dative, and applicative case roles, contrasting with the absolutive case, which is unmarked.

Most dechticaetiative languages are found in Africa, but English arguably contains dechticaetiative constructions, traditionally referred to as dative shift.

Some languages occasionally use the dative case, as in the Serbo-Croatian Kosa mu je gusta " His hair is thick " ( lit.

In the Northeast Caucasian languages, such as Tsez, the lative also takes up the functions of the dative case in marking the recipient or beneficent of an action.

One Latin element that has survived in Romanian while having disappeared from other Romance languages is the morphological case differentiation in nouns, albeit reduced to only three forms ( nominative / accusative, genitive / dative, and vocative ) from the original six or seven.

* postposed article, avoidance of the infinitive, merging of genitive and dative, and superessive number formation in some languages of the Balkans

Gratis in English is a colloquialism adopted from the various Romance and Germanic languages, ultimately descending from the plural ablative and dative form of the first-declension noun grātia in Latin.

In Serbocroatian ( as in other Slavic languages ), the dative construction is often used, mostly in the same manner as in German:

The most conspicuous features of the morphological system of these languages are: loss of the dual ; thematicization of consonantal stems ; merger of the f. ' i -/ u -' and ' ī -/ ū -' in one ' ī -/ ū -' inflexion, elimination of the dative, whose functions are taken over by the genitive, simultaneous use of different case-endings in one paradigm ; employment of ' mahyaṃ ' and ' tubhyaṃ ' as genitives and ' me ' and ' te ' as instrumentals ; gradual disappearance of the middle voice ; coexistence of historical and new verbal forms based on the present stem ; and use of active endings for the passive.

In English, the subject can or must agree with the finite verb in person and number, and in languages that have morphological case, the subject and object ( and other verb arguments ) are identified in terms of the case markers that they bear ( e. g. nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, ergative, absolutive, etc .).