Re: THEORY: Meanings of Verbal Accidents.

In a message dated 8/13/2007 2:16:31 PM Central Daylight Time,
ray@CAROLANDRAY.PLUS.COM writes:


> >  mori-or 'I die'       ~   am-or  'I am loved'
>
> Umm - I fail to see how "I die, I am dying" can possibly be considered
> _active_! Surely, if anything is passive, dying is.
>
> (I discount suicides from this - but they are a tiny minority, and then
> the reflexive 'I am killing myself' is perhaps more appropriate.)
>
> It has always seemed to me that Latin is rather more true to reality in
> giving the verb "to die" passive endings. I have yet to be convinced
> that 'morior' should be classified as a deponent verb any more that
> 'nascor' (I am being born) should be. The babe that gets thrust into int
> the world from its mother's womb s hardly the agent. At least with this
> verb English uses passive forms as well as Latin; yet, strangely
> anglophone Latin textbooks still list 'nascor' as a deponent - weird!
>
Just because a verb's subject isn't an agent doesn't mean the verb should be
passive.  Many subjects are patients, but that doesn't mean they are part of a
passive construction, e.g., "I see".

stevo   </HTML>

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