[tied] Re: Middle Voice

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.

-However, nowadays a reciprocal use is developing, at least in the
Norwegian language, and for some verbs this is the prefered way of
expressing reciprocal meaning.

-And there exist some verbs that only are used in the middle voise.

Yet, you can also express the passive periphrastically, and the
independent reflexive pronoun and the resiprocal pronoun still exist.


As far as I know, the middle voise still exist in modern greek, but
is now mostly used as a passive.