Correct English style: “I would advise you to x.”
Incorrect English style: “I would suggest you to x.”
Likewise:
Correct English style: “I would suggest you x.”
Incorrect English style: “I would advise you x.”
Maybe this goes in the same bucket with the realization that “it’s,” as a contraction for “it is”, is not admissible everywhere. E.g., here:
Me: “Is it 6:14pm?”
You: “Yes, it’s.”
Does not work.
Is there some good general reason why these are true? Or are they just one-off stylistic rules that native speakers have to learn one-by-one?
(Promise I don’t stalk your blog… it just shows up at the top of my Feedly for some reason- and the last few posts have been even more interesting than usual!)
Hopefully someone who actually knows something about this jumps in (Batsignal for Ted, who actually speaks an inflected language!) That being said …
The issue with suggest and advise is transitive/intransitive verbs and the objects thereof. I think that “advise” is intransitive (in this situation- I can always say “I advise two students” which would be transitive), and “suggest” is transitive. In Latin, some intransitive verbs can take an argument (as in this situation, effectively), and then the “you” after suggest and the “you” after advise would be in different cases (i.e. “te” vs “tibi”).
So it seems like you can always parse “I advise you to …” as “I advise that you …. in order to highlight the “dative-ness.” The “that” is often suppressed.
I read on wikipedia that there used to be a dative case in Old English; as cases fell out of use in English, prepositional phrases -which already existed for other cases- replaced it.
Anyway, this is quite a ramble, but it did lead me down a really interesting path this evening, so thanks for that!
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