Re: mixed system

J.Barefoot wrote:
>
> >From: Sally Caves <scaves@...>
> >Lately, I've
> >developed
> >a middle-voice that has some ergative tendencies, so my claim on my
> >"What Is
> >Teonaht" page is now a lie... that T. NEVER uses the patient (or what I
> >call the "object") to function as a subject.  So the rule seems to be
> >that
> >anything goes in a conlang.
> >
> >Sally
>
> Ergative tendencies? How so? Asiteya also has a middle voice, usually used
> when the patient is topicalized/focused (because only a topic or agent can
> be a subject).
I had toyed with turning T. into an ergative language a year ago when I
discovered ergativity and was all on fire (lehtdel!) about it, but the
language resisted.  I decided to do something that probably cannot be
called either the "middle voice" or the "ergative," but it goes like
this:

The "passive" is expressed through a periphrastic:  one "gets one's
hearing,"
meaning "one is heard."  Or:  "one is under hearing," meaning "one is
heard
or being heard."  But there are some expressions that use an old passive
form
that are neither completely passive or active, such as when you want to
say
"the rose smells lovely," or "the stew is cooking on the fire."  In
these
instances, both "rose" and "stew" are cast in the objective or
patientive
case and the verb gets an -ib ending that used to be my old past
participle
ending (rejected as too "European"), now used solely to represent that
it is
being cooked by an unstated subject:

        Ta    androfaiht il      rosa    olinib
        CAUS.  lovely    obj.art  rose   smell+old.pass.ending
        As lovely  (to unstated subject)  smells?  rose

        Nromil flehta  il      zoyzod kwecib
        On the fire   obj.art. stew  cook+old.pass.ending
        On the fire (unstated subject) cooks the stew.

The -ib ending is rarely used as any kind of passive when you can use
the
tsob (under) affix or the periphrastic, so I call it a kind of middle
voice.
Maybe this is wrong.

Sally