Re: preferred voices?

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> On Sat, 23 Sep 2000, nicole perrin wrote:
>
> > Yesterday we were reviewing the passive voice in my French class, and
> > one of the points the teacher made quite emphatically is that the active
> > voice is preferred.  I know that this is also the case with English,
> > although I could never understand it.  The only explanation I've ever
> > gotten is that it's not as powerful as active but I don't really buy
> > that.  Are any of your conlangs prejudiced against the passive voice?
> > Or any other voice for that matter?  (Mine aren't)
>
> Mine uses active case marking and there *is* no passive (I couldn't think
> of any way it would make sense).
Same in my lang (Nur-ellen).  I also came to the conclusion that passive
doesn't make sense in it.  A passive would move the object into the
subject
position, but by the logic of active case marking it would have to be
put
in the objective rather than the agentive case, which would mean no
change
of the case.

> In English the reason I've often seen (and the reason I avoid it much of
> the time) is that the passive often obscures responsibility.  For
> example, a company might say something like: "Two employees have been
> killed and the matter is under investigation"; there are a lot of ways to
> use the passive voice to misdirect the reader/listener.
Very true.  The passive voice is a hallmark of bureaucrat-ese,
and all too often it is used euphemistically, with a sentence like
the one quoted above used where "We have caused the death of two
employees,
and no-one bothers investigating the matter" would be in better accord
with the truth.  Elves tend to look upon such language abuse with
disgust,
and see the lack of a passive voice in their language as a virtue rather
than a defect.

Jörg.