[n3storm]

Homo homini lupus is the latin for "Man is wolf for man", famous quote from Plautus.

Homini is the declination of Homo, is dative case. I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give".

I know this from Philosophy and Latin (separate) in Highschool around the nineties in Spain. They both were compulsory global subjects. I think Latin is not compulsory this days.

[thaumasiotes]

> famous quote from Plautus

The quote from Plautus appears to be lupus est homo homini, which is much easier to parse. There's a verb and everything. (I didn't know that; I just looked it up.)

> I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give".

Yes, the word literally means "giving [case]", but the grammatical concept in English is generally called "indirect object". English mostly doesn't have cases, so supplemental arguments to verbs tend to be marked by associated prepositions, making them "indirect".

When talking about Latin specifically or languages with noun case in general, it is normal in English to refer to the "dative case"; you don't really need to translate it.

I assume the case was named after the action of giving because giving is a very common action that necessarily involves three things. (Giver, gift, and recipient.) The name tells you what it means by example: "if a gift is given, the dative case is the one you'd use for the recipient".

[anal_reactor]

> Homo homini lupus

And kiwi kiwi kiwi.

Couldn't help myself, being a speaker of a language with grammatical cases, which allows the translation of "homo homini lupus" without changing the grammatical structure. At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above.

[thaumasiotes]

> At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above.

I hope I'm safe in assuming that "kiwi kiwi kiwi" comes off as pure nonsense.

But if it's possible for loanwords to come in without being forced into the system, there must be something you could add to the sentence to bring back the effect? What would that look like?

[anal_reactor]

Honestly it's an edge case, because there are few loanwords that don't get involved in the declension system. For some reason the government made official guidelines that the system only applies to native words, but that didn't stick, and most loanwords do have declension forms. With "kiwi" being one of the exceptions of course.

Going back to the question though, I can't think of words I could add without changing the overall structure. As in, our translation of "homo homini lupus" is "człowiek człowiekowi wilkiem", and it's not like you could "just add something to make it full form". Well, you could say "człowiek człowiekowi jest wilkiem", with "jest" meaning "is", but when you say "kiwi kiwi jest kiwi", it still sounds like garbage. I guess the only way out of this would be to use something different, like "kiwi dla kiwi jest jak kiwi", which is "a kiwi to a kiwi is like a kiwi", but that's not what we want, because when we talk about people and wolves again, it becomes "człowiek dla człowieka jest jak wilk", and now it's clear that the cases have changed.

Giving an example of a loanword, the government's official position used to be (or even still is?) that "radio" has only one form, but if you ask me, "radio radiu radiem" sounds clear and natural.