Re: Sensible passives (was: confession: roots)

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, which shows (IMHO) that native speakers saw them as active rather than
passive in meaning. If they had been seen as passive, VL would have evolved
forms like NASCITUS ESSE or MORITUS ESSE to replace them, like it did with verbs
in passive voice.

Well, all this is purely speculation of myself and I may be completely off.
Still, the fact that those verbs are active in all Romance langs I know must
have a meaning... In my opinion, as a French native speaker, the parallel:
"naître, vivre et mourir" is very good, and I find it perfectly normal that
those three verbs are active. It "fits", so to say. I think there must be a
little bit of Sapir-Whorf in this. Even though I don't subscribe to all the S-W
hypothesis, there are some cases...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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