Re: Is this a passive?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nik Taylor" <yonjuuni@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 1:15 AM
Subject: Re: Is this a passive?


> Estel Telcontar wrote:
> >
> > I have a morpheme in mind for one of my languages, and I'm wondering if
> > it counts as a passive.  As far as I understand, passive normally
> >
> > (1) promotes the direct object to subject
> > (2) a. deletes the subject
> >  OR
> >     b. demotes the subject to an oblique
> >
> > The morpheme I'm thinking of is okay on (1) and (2)a. : The original
> > direct object becomes the subject, and the original subject can be
> > omitted.  It's in (2)b. that the question comes in: if the original
> > subject is still expressed, it is expressed as a direct object, not as
> > an oblique.
>
> I'd certainly call it a passive, tho one with a rather unusual way of
> expressing the agent.  That could, perhaps, be explained diachronically
> by an earlier sound change that collapsed the accusative with another
> oblique case, such as instrumental or genitive.
>
> In fact, as I mentioned in the thread about Monster Raving Loony
> Languages (re: verbs? on July 17), the past tense in Old Iranian was
> derived from a passive, but, due to a merger of the accusative and
> genitive cases, the agent was expressed with the oblique case and the
> patient with the nominative case.  Later the patient became marked with
> the oblique as well, creating the phenomenon wherein, for past tense
> verbs, the subject of an intransitive is marked one way, and both the
> subject and object of a transitive are marked another way.
>
The same happened in Sanskrit and the Indic languages.  This makes the past
tense Ergative, to some degree.  In Nepali, this has optionally spread to
the other tenses, making Nepali a fully fledged ergative language,
optionally.

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