Re: Active and Passive please help.

 "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> writes:

> Quoting Almaran Dungeonmaster <dungeonmaster@...>:
>
> > Joe Hill  wrote
> >
> > > My language has no passive sentences.   I can't seem to translate it
> > > was called into and active sentence...
> >
> > Do you mean you want to convert the phrase "it was called" into an
> > active phrase? It might be a little hard, since "to be called" in
> > the current meaning is inherently passive in English.
>
> No, it's just unusual to use the active in most kinds of discourse.
> Say you and your spouse just had a new baby. Naturally everyone's
> going to ask what the child's name is going to be.  A natural
> way of answering those questions is:  "We're calling him/her X".
>
> >  However, other
> > languages have an active verb for naming things.
> >
> > E.g. in dutch, we use the verb "heten" to name things.
>
> Unsurprisingly, German uses the cognate _heissen_ as a passive:
>
>    "Ich heisse Thomas" = "I am called Thomas"
Or Middle and Old English as well!

 heten /het@n/

  he het Thomas  He is called Thomas    /hEt/
  he hight Thomas He was called Thomas  /hIxt/


Elliott