Latin · Chapter 5 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Genitive and dative in practice
Whose, and to whom. The genitive of possession and the partitive, the dative of the indirect object, and the datives Latin uses where English reaches for a whole phrase.
The short version
Some Latin verbs take a dative where English takes an object
Credo, pareo, placeo, servio, noceo, faveo, persuadeo and impero all look transitive in English and are not in Latin. Deo credo is I trust God, and the accusative deum would simply be wrong. There is no principle to derive here and no shortcut. The list is short enough to learn as a list, and it accounts for a striking share of the mistakes in a beginner's prose composition.
Deo credo.
est mihi liber is how Latin says I have a book
Beside the ordinary habeo, Latin owns things the other way round: the thing possessed becomes the subject and the owner goes into the dative. Est mihi liber is literally there is a book to me. The genitive handles the other side of ownership, plus the partitive: pars militum, satis pecuniae, nihil novi. And watch the overlap while you are there, because puellae is genitive singular, dative singular and nominative plural at once, with only the sentence to settle it.
Est mihi liber.
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