En réponse à John Cowan <cowan@...>:
>
> What *is* weird about English is its ability to promote the IO as well
> as
> the DO to subject by passivization:
Which is why I used English as an example. It was the closest possible due to
this very feature.
"The fish was given to Tlefrin by
> Netannin". BrE can omit the "to" here, but AmE can't.
>
Can BrE really omit the "to"? I doubt it's very common, since I've never seen
it...
> I think it's interesting that the Mandarin verb qu4 = "go to" treats
> the destination as DO: "wo qu Beijing" = I go Beijing.
Which sounds reasonable. The verb already indicates that you are heading
towards a direction. No need for a preposition to make the case even
clearer ;)))) (Itakian does kind of the contrary: there are no verbs of
movement, movement is rendered through nominal sentences with a prepositional
predicate. So "I go to Paris" is "I to Paris").
AFAIK no IE
> language can do that.
Not that I know of. I've read that Russian can use constructions like the one I
described for Itakian, but that's a bit different.
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.