PIE grammar (4) -- the voices

IV VERBS: The PIE Voices

The standard reconstruction of PIE recognises two voices, the active and the middle (I’ll use the latter term as handy shorthand for ‘mediopassive’). The middle expresses the idea of an activity affecting the agent, e.g. somebody doing something to oneself, for one’s own pleasure of benefit (or to one’s own detriment), reciprocally (with dual or plural agents), or of the grammatical subject being the logical object of the sentence (as in typical passive constructions).

The contrast between the two voices must have been, at least partly, a matter of stress placement at some point in the internal history of PIE, middle forms having once sported final stress falling on inflectional endings, whose accented variants ended in *-o. Athematic verbs often preserve the original stress variation and the corresponding vowel-grade contrasts. In some branches the middle preterite has the following endings (the reconstruction is problematic for persons other than those given):

2sg. athematic *-so, thematic *-e-so

3sg. athematic *-to, thematic *-e-to

3pl. athematic *-nto, thematic *-o-nto

For example, *jug-s-tó [jukstó] ‘he joined (= became allied with, met, etc.)’ as opposed to *jé:ug-s-t [jé:ukst] ‘he united (something with something else)’.

The middle present could have the same endings as the middle preterite plus the present-tense marker *-r (unique to the middle) or *-i (shared with, and presumably borrowed from, the active), e.g.:

*wég^H-e-tor or *wég^H-e-toi ‘he is transported, travels on’

*gWHn-tór or *gWHn-tói ‘he gets killed, kills himself’

However, there is good evidence that the spread of these formations is a late (post-PIE) phenomenon, and that there was also an old middle with endings like those of the perfect (and of the Hittite ‘hi’-conjugation), attached to durative or aorist stems. Those endings are especially well preserved in Anatolian and their PIE status is supported (to a lesser or greater degree) by Italic, Celtic, Tocharian and Indo-Iranian evidence. The reconstruction is still extremely uncertain and the examples below are only meant to give you an approximate idea of what such forms MAY have looked like:

*bHér-o-h2or ‘I am borne’

*ph2s-th2ór ‘thou art guarded’ (from *pah2s- ‘guard, watch’)

*wes-ó ‘he got dressed’

It is thinkable, in fact, that BOTH formations are old. Their detailed analysis, however, is not an autonomous problem but must be discussed together with the question of the origin and early form of the PIE active conjugations -- so difficult and speculative that it would get us well beyond the scope of an introductory presentation.

Piotr