Re: Active and Passive please help.
| From: | Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, December 16, 2001, 22:34 |
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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"
=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
"...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
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