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.

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