Why translate 'X etadahosi' as 'the thought occurred to X'? Having read translations of suttas in English and also in my native language, I noticed that every single one of them renders the phrase '(this or that person) etadahosi (quoted thought)' (but see the ETA footnote below) as 'then the following thought occurred to (this or that person)'. If I was left to my own devices (i.e. no easy access to the Commentaries - I have the texts, I'm more or less all right with Pali grammar, but my Pali vocabulary is not very good, making reading slow and skimming over Pali text in search of a topic an impossibility), I'd surely come to the conclusion that this construct means something akin to the modern slang 'then (this or that person) was like: ...'. In other words, the literal meaning seems to convey an outsider's perspective while the - assumedly canonical - translations give sort of an inside view of what happens in - or rather: to - the mind of the person in question.

So my question is: why is this particular translation chosen, apparently every time? 

I assume, of course, that it is chosen because an explanation to this effect is found somewhere in the Commentaries, and in that case I'd also like to know where can I find it?

ETA: @ChrisW drew my attention to the fact that the original phrase is actually '(to this or that person) etadahosi', the person is not in nominative but in either dative or genitive.

ETA2: I ended up being convinced that the meaning is clear from the grammar alone and not coming from commentaries. The person to whom the thought occurs is in Dative (or Genitive - Dative is my bet, though), and that it is a thought that occurs to them is clear from the fact that a thought follows the construct. So I'm accepting the answer which draws my attention to the fact that the subject is not in nominative.
I'm not an expert (please consider this instead as an "exercise for the student" for someone to correct).

When it's used in a phrase like, "bhikkhūnaṃ etadahosi", isn't "bhikkhus" there in the plural genitive or plural dative case? Anyway, not nominative. So wouldn't you translate that as "of the bhikkhus", or, "to the bhikkhus"?

You say you translate 'etadahosi' literally as 'was thus' ... could it mean instead, "this was"?

Anyway, given that "bhikkhus" isn't nominative, maybe the most literal translation is, "this was, to the bhikkhus" ... or in other words, "this (thought or statement) occurred, to the bhikkhus".

If I look at other instances of etadahosi I see they too are preceded by a noun with the naṃ or ssa case endings.



Also it sometimes is translated as "they thought".