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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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Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>