Re: Medio-passive (was: A Survey)

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003 18:48:38 +0100, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

>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.
So where did the impersonal -r come from?

- Rob