Re: Sensible passives (was: confession: roots)

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".

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At 3:24 pm -0400 8/5/01, Roger Mills wrote:
[snip]
>
>Same with die/kill-- with the added complication that there are many ways of
>dying and killing, which might need to be specified.
This is very true.  In ancient Greek, _thne:skei_ (or, in prose, more
commonly _apothne:skei_) meant 's/he is dying', i.e. 's/he is becoming
dead' (-sk- is a choative suffix); but it also served as the passive of
'"to kill" and could, thus, also mean 's/he is getting killed'.

Indeed, it has seemed to me that one could have something like this:
morte (adj.) = dead
morteska = to become dead, to die
mortiza = to make dead, to kill

The latter could have whatever passive formation the language used, or:
mortizat = killed (participle)
mortizateska = become killed, get killed

(This is no particular conlang - just an ad_hoc con-Romancelang)

I'm not saying this is how things should be done - far from it.  Merely
suggesting it is a way things could be done.
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At 3:45 pm -0400 8/5/01, John Cowan wrote:
>Roger Mills wrote:
[snip]
>The English historical evidence strongly suggests "agent" as the correct
>role.  Consider the Apostle's Creed:  "Jesus Christ [...] who was [...]
>born of the Virgin Mary."  Now in modern language we'd expect "born to",
>so what is that "of" doing?
16th cent. literal translation of Latin, I assume:
..qui natus est ex Maria Virgine.

>Well, in Early ModE "of" was the regular preposition of the agent:
>"And being warned of [i.e. by] God in a dream that they should not return
>to Herod, they departed into their own country another way."  (Matt. 2:12).
>
>So we have an ordinary passive verb construction here.
True.

>And what is the
>active form, of which "born" is the participle?  Why, "bear", to be sure.
>"And she [Eve] again bare [past] his brother Abel." (Gen 4:2).
>
>So that answers your other question.  English has, or had, a verb
>that does exactly what you want, with three roles: agent, the mother;
>patient, the child; beneficiary, the father.  "And Hagar bare [to] Abram
>a son."  (Gen. 16:15).
Exactly.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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