21st Century Classical Greek -- it's not accusative

I was working on my Arabic language project and came across the topic "doubly accusative".

As you know, I wouldn't bring it up unless it was a stupid piece of nomenclature.

The Quranic citation was Baqara 53 which you could translate in part as "We gave Moses the Scripture..."

Wait a minute.

In English we would call Moses the indirect object and we would call its case dative.

But the case used in Arabic is the same as for Scripture, which we WOULD call accusative, since it's the direct object.

Welp in LSJ a bunch of entries have the note "c. acc. pers. et rei." One example is lissomai, which has this notation in meaning 2. And it means pray to a god (the pers.) about something.

And we would expect the god to be in dative as well. Classical Greek did have a dative (modern Greek does not), but it's not used here.

Also liteuo has the same note, but the pers. is somebody you entreat, and the rei is what you entreat on behalf of. And that is "for" which usually takes the dative in Greek.

I said all through my Greek thread that using case names turns out to be confusing because we keep thinking in Grenglish and Greek doesn't work that way. It turns out Arabic has the identical issue, only Quranic Arabic has already dropped the dative that Classical Greek kept.

I may do an Arabic thread to give examples of all the problems as well as give citations. You can read my Biblical Hebrew and Greek threads for a sneak peak at the kind of things grammarians have been screwing up for 25 centuries.