Re: Passive to intransitive ...

"Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...> 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").
>
> Now the question is, is there any precedent for a such development in any
> natlang any of you know of?
Well, I think I have seen an example that looks like it here.  This is from the
'Ponapean Reference Grammar' I have checked out from the library.  Ponapean has
different forms for intransitive and transitive verbs, apparently generally
derived one from another by ablaut/prefix/suffix/reduplication.  This was one of
the suffixes, that seems close in meaning to your -aza:

    -ek Intransitives

    Intrans.    English
    dilip      "to mend, of a thatch roof"
    dilipek    "to be mended, of a thatch roof"

    amwir      "to crumple"
    emwirek    "to be crumpled"

    diar       "to find"
    dierek     "to be found"

    wengid     "to wring"
    wengidek   "to be twisted"

    widinge    "to deceive"
    wedingek   "to be deceitful"

This '-ek' is said here to be "probably fossilized" and not recognized by most
speakers as a separate morpheme, and its job was to "form resultative
intransitive verbs from transitive roots".

Anyway I think that your example could easily fit here,

    tesh       "to see"
    teshaz     "to look, appear [= be seen]"


     *Muke!
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