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To Like

Basics

The Latin languages have forms like this:

Italian: Mi piace cafe. 'Coffee please me.'
Castilian: Me gusta cafe. 'Coffee please me.'

The English word with the same meaning is please (like the Italian piace, this is from the Latin placere).

But in English it is not normal to say coffee pleases me. Instead we say I like coffee.

Speakers of Latin languages often make the mistake of thinking that like means please/piace/gusta, so they say:

**Coffee likes me.

This is wrong. The correct form is

I like coffee.

Details

The two verbs like and please both refer to pleasure. Each is a transitive verb with two relations, the subject and object. These verbs express two things (roles), the cause of pleasure and the experiencer of pleasure. The relations express opposite roles in the two verbs:

Verb Cause of pleasure Experiencer of pleasure
please subject object
like object subject

Coffee pleases John.
Coffee, the subject, is the cause of pleasure.
John, the object, is the experiencer of pleasure.

John likes coffee.
John, the subject, is the experiencer of pleasure.
Coffee, the object, is the cause of pleasure.

Italian piace and Castilian gusta mean please: the cause of pleasure is the subject. However, they have a non-standard word order in which the subject follows the verb. This can make people think that the cause of pleasure is the object rather than the subject.

No such confusion exists in English. Both please and like have the standard word order: subject-verb-object.

Archaic Forms

In older forms of English the verb like was used as piace/gusta is:

Why, now thou hast unwish'd five thousand men;
Which likes me better than to wish us one.
- Henry V, 4:3, William Shakespeare

But this does not occur in present day English. A translation of the second line above into present day English would be

Which I like better than to wish us one.

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