Correction: I'm told

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I hasten to correct a mistake I made in my last message.  It's in the passage:
 
>...Historical English scholars are quick to point out that early English
>word order allowed "impersonal passives", e.g., "the boy-DAT was given a
>book-ACC", where it is actually still "book" that is passivised, to be
>reinterpreted as "the boy-NOM ..."  (German still approximates English
>indirect passivisation this way.)  So that is usually offered as another
>factor occasioned by case loss/merger...
 
I overshot what I wanted to say.  The OE impersonal passive, reflex of a
more general older IE construction, is as given above, but the "theme"
("book") is NOT passivised, since it preserves the ACC marking.  The
passivisation gets rid of the subject and indicates that by a mark on the
verb but does NOT change other case marking.
 
Maybe anticipation of the German parallel momentarily confused me, since
the German approximation of the English (and Bantu) indirect passivisation
(common in German translations of indirect passivisation in Bantu) is
"boy-DAT was a book-NOM given", where "book" is indeed passivised but
postposed (according to German subject post-posing rules, i.e., to-the boy
was a book given).  (P.S. with neuters, e.g., "book", NOM and ACC are not
distinct, an IE trait, but number agreement of the verb depends on the
passivised ACC > NOM, e.g., "boy-DAT *were* book*s* given.).