The Dative of Possession

Was your name given to you or created by you?

I was confused during a recent Greek lesson in Scripturial. Phrases like “my name” and “your name” were being taught as ὄνομα σοι and ὄνομα μοι. To me, σοι and μοι looked like the dative forms when I was expecting the genitive.

After a quick consultation with ChatGPT (GPT-4o), I was under the impression that for this phrase in particular, Greek speakers would say something like “the name for me” rather than “the name of me” (the latter of which I was expecting based upon my current mental map between Greek and English). In trying to confirm ChatGPT’s answer, I stumbled across this interesting B-Greek post.

The folks discussing this very question on the forum confirmed GPT-4o’s suggestion that the dative is used in Greek to express this idea. They link to a grammar that calls this The Dative of Possession:

The dative of possession is closely related to the dative of advantage. Simple possession is expressed by the genitive (§888.1); the one for whom something exists (i.e. in his or her interest) is put in the dative…

In the forum, the initial answers sounded very similar to what GPT-4o had told me, but later on, some contributors started posting statistics to compare the frequency of constructions like ὅνομά μοι and ὄνομά μου. It ends up looking like both constructions are used somewhat widely and there is variance across time and also whether 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person is being used.

When I think about it, this construction makes sense. One’s name is given (a name “for” you) rather than generated from them. I suspect that in Greek there is a bit more psychological separation between one’s identity/being and one’s name than there is in English? In English, I am Mike, my name is Mike, etc… “Mike” is not a name for me, it’s my name.

I continue to find Scripturial a very useful way to improve my Greek, while working at a pace that fits with everything else I have going on in life. Like this one though, there are instances where a construction that is taught leaves me with questions that I need to resolve on my own. I suspect that’s a worthwhile tradeoff to make (letting my curiosity dictate further research) in order to keep the curriculum compact.

This is enough for me to know that I need to recognize ὅνομά μοι and ὄνομά μου as serving a similar purpose without assuming they are identical. I wonder if B-Greek content is part of OpenAI training data? I would guess so. In any case, I’m a bit late to the party, but B-Greek looks like great place to discuss and learn about these sorts of things online.