Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Carol F. Justus <cjustus at mail.utexas.edu>
Date: Friday, June 18, 1999 6:49 AM

>Spanish estar, I believe, is etymologically related to PIE
>*staµ- (*steH-) 'stand' which, in an Ancient Greek active root aorist had
>an intransitive meaning (stand, take a standing position: eå-steµ), but a
>transitive meaning with sigmatic aorist forms (eå-steµ-sa). I have no
>solution to this nor to what PIE *es- was supplemented in Spanish.

[Ed Selleslagh]

In short, 'estar' is from Lat. 'stare', 'to stand, remain,...'; it means to
be somewhere or in a certain condition (temporarily). Lat. 'esse' led to
'ser' = to be something (more absolute).

[snip]

>But the fact that the Romance language reflexives are formally separate
>from the passives of those languages makes me hesitant to identify them as
>one with the old category, which could also have a passive meaning. In
>Modern Greek, is there also a new separate passive?

[Ed]

No.

>Already in Ancient
>Greek with some verbs in some tenses there was a new strictly passive
>suffix (-the:-) that often had passive meaning (The problem with the old
>categories was that a form might vary in function depending on the verb in
>question or the form of the verb. Smyth's Greek Grammar catalogs this
>without really offering the kinds of principled generalizations that we
>would now like.

[Ed]

The modern Greek medio-passive can be reflexive, medio-passive or passive in
meaning. Its aorist contains the /-th(i)-/ infix, both in the indicative and
the subjunctive. The medio-passive is called /pathitikí fóni/, meaning
'passive (actually: suffering) voice'!

Carol, thank you for the enlightening comments. I agree with you that we
should
delve more into such phenomena, as they often represent, IMHO, modern
manifestations of a long-standing undercurrent, deeply embedded in the
underlying cognitive framework, expressed with the means available at any
given time, or by innovations made 'necessary' because of the loss of older
means, the awareness of them, or the feel for them.

Ed.