R: Re: Sensible passives (was: confession: roots)

Raymond wrote:

> At 2:26 pm -0400 8/5/01, Steg Belsky wrote:
> >On Tue, 8 May 2001 18:50:58 +0000 Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
> >writes:
> >> >and thus would not
> >> >*need* a passive.  What's the passive of "die"?  :-)
> >
> >> In a sensible language like Latin "to die" is passive  :-)
> >
> >> Ray.
> >-
> >
> >Hey, are you calling Rokbeigalmki not a sensible language?  :-P
>
> As I think you guessed, I was being a bit "tongue in cheek".
>
> However, I could never understand why _nasci_ & _moriri_ were listed as
> deponent verbs in Latin, when even to a fairly naive schoolboy (as I was
in
> the 1950s) the meanings were fairly obviously passive; the more so _nasci_
> as the English "to be born" is merely a graphical variant of "to be
borne",
> i.e. the passive of "to bear".
Because in modern Romance languages the verbs 'to be born' and 'to die' are
active (Italian has nascere and morire). Scholars were mainly from Romance
countries (the Renaissence is an almost wholly Italian product, after all),
and they felt these as deponents, because in their own languages have an
active meaning.

Or at least I think so.

Luca