Re: Passive and active....

FFlores wrote:
>
> Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...> wrote:
> >
> > So, how do all of your languages handle active and passive voice, if at
> > all?
>
> I'm partial towards marking voice in verbs, probably because
> using a simple 'to be + participle' construction looks unexotic
> (to me, that is).
<snip stuff about Pablo's conlangs>

I usually mark voice in verbs too.  In Nevokányi the stem changes:

meszi -- to see, infinitive
mesz- --normal stem
meszis- --passive stem

and the agent (usually) takes the instrumental case, with the patient
taking the nominative.

Khundruzn required a similar construction on the verb, as well as a
particle after the agent.

In a newly begun lang, önaila, which I'm constructing for a friend and
so want to make pretty simple and not incredibly foreign, I think I'm
going to use a special auxiliary verb to construct the passive,
something like this:

I hit the ball.
I.nom the.ball.acc hit.past

The ball was hit by me.
the.ball.nom I.inst hit.inf passive.past

Which is a lot like English, it's just that it would use a completely
different auxiliary for the passive, not "to be."

Nicole
--
nicole.eap@snet.net
http://nicole.conlang.org