Medellin Taxi
This was originally posted on my old blog, ngmarleyDOTnet, on Jul 12, 2009 @ 15:00 CST. That blog is now defunct and the content is slowly being absorbed into this one. This is one of a few posts I wrote when traveling Latin America during the summer of 2k9.
As I entered a taxi a couple of days ago, the driver said to me “¿Cómo me le va?”, which I took to mean “Como le va?” (how are you), but he added an extra “me” in there, which perplexed me. In all my time studying/speaking Spanish, I’ve never heard it worded this way before (with the extra 1st person personal pronoun thrown in). I asked the taxista to repeat the question, and he clarified for me with a slowly-spoken “¿Cómo estás?”.
That’s been bugging me for a couple of days, so I had to look it up. Apparently my taxista was employing the ethic dative (dativo ético), which according to wiktionary is “the use of the dative case of a pronoun to signify that the person (or thing) being referred to is regarded with interest”.
Here are a couple of sites I’ve dug up (in Spanish) with information on the Spanish ethic dative.
This one is geared more specifically to my question.
http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/Foro-preguntas/ARCHIVO-Foro/c%C3%B3mo%20me%20le%20va.htm
This page has a ton of info on superfluous datives.
http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/gram%C3%A1ticas/gram%C3%A1tica%20espa%C3%B1ola/dativos%20superfluos.htm