Re: Medio-passive (was: A Survey)

On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 01:45 , Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

[snip]
> Kerno:
>
> It's a Romance language that wears a kilt, so in
> essence, it does things in a Romance fashion. The
> active verb looks like a conventional active verb
> in French or Spanish. Its Celtic roots show in
> the retention of the -r passive; though one could
> argue (and I think successfully) that the -r
> passive is simply a remnant of the
> Latin........
One could indeed, for that is what the Latin '3rd sing. passive'
once was - the impersonal form still found in the Britto-Gallic
languages.   It's one of several isoglosses that have led many
to think in terms of an 'Italo-Celtic' language family.

The Latin passive was a secondary formation
derived partly by extending the impersonal -r; and it never
extended beyond tenses formed on the infectum ("present
stem").  The perfect tenses were formed, as you know,
analytically with verb 'to be" as auxiliary.

Ray
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