--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "aquila_grande"
<aquila_grande@...> wrote:
> The Scandinavian languages Norwegian, Sweedish, and Danish have
> a "middle voise". It has no connection with the old IE middle
voise,
> but it is interesting to sketch out its historical developement.
>
> -It emerged as a contraction between the reflexive pronouns and
the
> verb endings ca 1000 years ago. At the beginning it had mostly
> reflexive meaning.
>
> -Steadily more it was used in a passive sense, and this is the
main
> use of it today.
>
We can see many later developments from reflexive to passive. In
Scandinavian (suffixed s), Slavic (-sI ) and Romance (si dicono
molte bugie, se habla español). Special for Romance (but not unknown
in Scandinavian) is the agentless impersonal passive corresponding
to German "man": qui si mangea bene).
The development of old IE medium and later suffixed reflexive-
pronoun-based mediopassives as in Scandinavian and Slavic seems to
be parallel in many respects, where the doer expressed by an agent
the real passive is the last phase.
But the morphological history of old medium and later s passives is
hardly the same.
It is difficult to detect any traces of a reflexive pronoun in the
old medium endings.
Interesting and intriguing is Miguel Carrasquer Vidal's posting on
PIE morphology some years ago.
In his scenario the endings are built on the dative of persons not
reflecting the subject as seen by the fact that -m never occurs in
the first, -r never in the second persons.
Trying to conceive this scenario I see it as an ethic dative
referring the attention of the action to a person different from
the subject involved in the colloquial process: "I follow for your
information a wolf", "you follow I notice a wolf".
Is this conception sensible for explaining mitigation of the
subject's influence in a low-activity process starting the whole
development towards an agent passive?
Lars