[EM] e.g.

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

>Markus wrote (21 Jan 2002):
> > It seems that you don't know what "e.g." means.
> > "E.g." means "exempli gratia" ("for example").

e.g. is widely-used, but your use of it could just as easily mean
that you were giving an example of something that I said, rather
than, as you meant, an example of something that I didn't say.
Because there was no clear purpose in an example of something that
I didn't say, I assumed that you thought that you were giving an
example of something that I said.

I said:

>
>Shouldn't that be "exempli gratiae", if we want the "for"
>to be expressed?

Markus replied:

Nope! "Gratia" is already ablativus.

I reply:

I didn't mean to say that I intended for -ae to be ablative.
The "for" meaning, it then seemed to me, is expressed by the dative case.
And when I looked it up, there is a dative of purpose, but I
couldn't find an ablative of purpose.

But I when I looked up "gratia", they said that (as ablative I
presume) it can mean "for the sake of", and when I finally found
the expansion of "e.g.", gratia apparently is used in that way there.

Ok, idioms aren't predictable. Maybe, though we say "_for_ example",
Latin speaks of it as a cause rather than as a purpose. Or maybe
there _is_ an ablative of purpose, though the list of case uses
I was checking didn't have it.

In any case, "gratiae" was what I expected, for the reasons I mentioned,
which was why I asked the question.

Mike Ossipoff




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