Re: Sensible passives (was: confession: roots)

At 4:32 pm +0200 10/5/01, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
>>
>> 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".
>>
>
>Well, their classification as deponent verbs must be due to the fact that
>those
>verbs evolved into active verbs in Romance langs, and thus were already active
>in VL,
Yes, I know the diachronic reason why - I just said that to a young
schoolkid in his teens I could never understand why since (a) 'to be born'
is passive in English (So does that mean English has a deponent verb?) and
(b) 'dying' didn't seem to me a very active process, but rather something
that happened to one.

Indeed, since those far off days of comparative innocence, I've had
occasion to see people approaching death and every case I've witness it's
certainly something the person underwent or suffered (passive <-- passus
'having suffered').  Whatever it was, it wasn't any but active.

But I can see that inchoative verbs would make sense for birth & death: to
become born, to become dead.   Indeed, the Latin _na:sci_ is both passive
and inchoative - to undergo the processs of becoming born: na:sci: <--
*gna: + sc + i:.

Ray.



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