Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Sensible passives (was: confession: roots)

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 9, 2001, 18:13
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". -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================

Replies

John Cowan <cowan@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Mangiat <mangiat@...>R: Re: Sensible passives (was: confession: roots)