Re: Medio-passive (was: A Survey)
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Friday, October 3, 2003, 18:11 |
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On Friday, October 3, 2003, at 04:15 , Nik Taylor wrote:
> Rob Haden wrote:
>> Hmm. However, I think that in Spanish it would be "lavo los manos."
>
> Nope. It's "Me lavo las manos"
Thanks - I was pretty sure it was.
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On Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 10:28 , Rob Haden wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Oct 2003 19:36:29 +0100, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
>> No - both the Greek middle voice & the modern Romance reflexives can
>> take direct objects, i.e. can be transitive:
>
> tas kheiras louomai.
> je me lave les mains.
>
> Hmm. However, I think that in Spanish it would be "lavo los manos." Is
> it
> possible that in those examples of the middle voice that you gave, that
> the
> idea is doing something for one's own benefit?
I guess washing one's own hands is always for one's own benefit - tho a
small
boy made to do so by his Mum may think differently.
The point is that the hands belongs to the subject of the sentence.
tas kheiras louo: (active) would mean that I was washing the hands of
someone else or of something else (e.g. a statue). It would make sense
only if the hands had already been identified. If not, the sentence would
be incomplete - we would want to know whose hands they were.
Whether or not "je lave les mains" would have the same response in French
I leave to Christophe to comment.
> Would you say "tas sou kheiras louomai"?
"tas sas kheiras louomai" or
"tas kheiras sou louomai" - are both OK but would mean rather more than
just "I'm washing your hands". It would mean that the subject has an
interest in making sure the hands do get washed: the sort of thing an
ancient Greek Mum might say to recalcitrant son :)
Indeed, it needn't even mean that the subject does the washing; merely
that the subject initiates the washing and is involved in someway in the
process. To revert to the ancient Greek example, Mum may well have
got(ten) a slave to do the actual washing. It's more like the the
English:
"I'm getting your hands washed [whether you like it or not]"
Ray
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