Re: Subject/Object participles

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 8:46 PM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 8:24 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:
>
>> nail as the object of 'hammer'. As far as I can tell, present
>> participles in English are always subject-oriented, while past
>> participles are always object oriented, and altering that requires
>> circumlocutions like "the nail which is being hammered" to get 'nail'
>> to be the object in the present tense. But one could just as well have
>> a system that marks the tense/aspect/etc. of a participle separately
>> from whether the thing it modifies is a subject or object. So, what
>> languages do that, and how? And is it done in natural languages, or
>> just conlangs?
>
> Esperanto:
>
> la kuranta viro = the running man
> la martelata najlo = the being-hammered nail
>
> with -int and -ont for past and future active/subject participles,
> and -it and -ot for past and future passive/subject participles.
Neat.
I seem to be on a roll of being surprised by neat features of
languages I thought I knew something about but apparently didn't
lately.

> This is true of the so-called "present participle" which is really
> imperfective participle; but it is true of "past participle" _only_ if the
> verb is transitive, in which case it is a perfect passive participle. If,
> however, the verb is intransitive then the "past participle" is a perfect
> _active_ participle, i.e. is "subject-oriented", e.g.
> 'our departed friends' corresponds to 'our friends have departed'.
Aha! Good point. I probably would've figured that out if I had thought about it.
Also, thanks for the proper terminology- 'active' vs. 'passive'. Don't
know why I didn't think of that, either....

-l.