Re: Passive to intransitive ...

Andreas Johansson wrote:

>Well, I had a little I idea that I thought was pretty nice; Tairezazh's
>ancestor language Classical Klaish had an inflected passive fromed with the
>ending _-aza_. This passive fell out of use in the Tairezazh branch*, being
>replaced by sentences without explicit subject (like replacing "He was
seen"
>with "Saw him"). Now I thought I'd have some fossilized forms with slightly
>changed meaning. Eg, CK _téshaza_ "is seen" would yield T _teshaz_, but the
>later would not any longer be a inflected form of the verb _téshe_>_tesh_
>"see(s)", but rather a distinct intransitive verb "look(s)" (as in "She
>looks good").

Nice idea, which I may have to sneak into Proto Kash and its developments.
At present Kash has no good way to express passive, though OTOH its's more a
matter of focus and translation anyway IMO.  Noun-objects/emphatic pronouns
when fronted can be translated as passives, inter alia.  But the main verb
is active in form.
Dropping a subject pronoun is colloquial, so proper _ne matikas_ 'I see/saw
him' > ne tikas , which in context could also mean 'you, we, they see/saw
him'.   By convention, concepts like "he was seen" use the 3d pers. plural:
ne (emph. ine) itikas.  Nor is there any way to evade responsibility by
using "one"-- 'one might think.....' would have to marked for a specific
person.

>Now the question is, is there any precedent for a such development in any
>natlang any of you know of?
IIRC  couldn't the passive of Lat. video be used to mean "seem"?  in
particular videtur?

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