"Ĉu mi povas fidi al ŝi?"
Translation:Can I trust her?
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Can 'fidi' be used either with an accusative and 'al' + noun? Is there a nuance in meaning?
fidi ŝin would probably work as well. (But not fidi ŝi without accusative.)
Why does Esperanto use an indirect object here? It's not as if we could also have a direct object somehow relating to the verb as well as the indirect object, so why does it complicate matters?
I only ask because it's a designed language - there's probably a reason somewhere!
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a calque on German jemandem vertrauen, which uses the dative case.
A number of oddities (from the point of view of English speakers) are because a given construction was based on Polish or Russian or German or another language that Zamenhof spoke.
(For example, old Esperanto used elrigardi for "to look = to have a certain appearance", as in "she looked rich" -- presumably a calque of German aussehen. Nowadays, aspekti is the usual word for this meaning.)
