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Re: Observations on Ancient Greek Voice (LONG!)

At 9:28 AM -0400 5/28/97, Rolf Furuli wrote:

>Dear Carl,

>

>Thank you for your excellent discussion of reflexive/passive verbs.

>

>A Scandinavian example: In old Norse the reflexive pronoun is "sik" 

>(equivalent to French "se" and German "sich"). We have the same 

>reflexive pronoun in Norwegian, written "seg". However, we also have a


>passive form which is distinguished by the letter "s", and this "s" 

>can be traced back to the first letter of the old Norse reflexive 

>pronoun "sik"

>

>Norwegian:

>Active: Han vasker (= he cleans/is cleaning)

>Reflexive: Han vasker seg (= he cleans/is cleaning himself)

>Passive: Han vaskes (= he is being cleaned).

>

>In Norwegian, therefore, a reflexive construction was original and it


>evolved into a passive one.


Thanks very much for this fascinating tidbit, Rolf. I will say that my
ideas about evolution of reflexive into passive were somewhat
speculative on my part, although I suspect that serious linguists have
worked this out in scholarly literature of which I am unaware. I was a
bit hesitant about generalizing about Indo-European because it's such
an immense linguistic realm, and I am competent in (read that as
"vaguely familiar with") so few of the IE languages. The sole authority
upon which I based those assertions is the rather brief account in
Andrew Sihler, _New Comparative Greek and Latin Grammar_ (Oxford UP,
1995), #414. "Voice." Sihler does indeed occasionally venture out into
his own theories, but he seems to be generally sound and reliable. For
those of you who don't know, I might note that Sihler's work is the
replacement/update of the decades-long authoritative work of C.D. Buck,
which had the same title (<italic>sans </italic> "New") and which was
published by UChicagoP well over 50 years ago.

Carl W. Conrad

Department of Classics, Washington University

One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130

(314) 935-4018

cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu  OR cwc@oui.com

WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
References: