Re: Active and Passive please help.
From: | Christopher B Wright <faceloran@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, December 18, 2001, 9:02 |
Joe Hill sekalge:
> My language has no passive sentences. I can't seem to translate it
was called into and active sentence...
> Can anyone help?
If your language is (mostly) agglutinating, you can add an infix to the
verb or even the subject to make it passive.
If your language inflects a lot, you could make a noun tense that
signifies passive tense or make verb conjugations that are specifically
passive.
If your language is largely isolating, try putting a particle somewhere
in there to make it passive. (That's what I did in Sturnan; Delwi
teketalge Erdhom (God make-he did Earth), but Erdhom o teketalge (Earth
was made). (Note: I put it as if the reciever of action was the doer and
simply added the passive particle in, but you could do otherwise.)
That's if you even want to make sentences specifically passive. You don't
have to; you can have something (word order, change of stress, whatever)
that makes the object more important than the subject (instead of, for
instance, "He kicked the can", you could say "the can he kicked" or "he
the can kicked" or whatever).
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