Re: The Meanings of Middle, or mana kartam

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Joachim Pense <jo-01@...> wrote:

>
> Am Sat, 03 Feb 2007 16:28:43 -0000 schriebst du:
>
> > The semantics of the middle has always escaped me. He did it for
> > himself vs. he did it? Why would a language find that distinction so
> > important that it needed a separate category? And why would that
> > category at times turn into a passive?
> >
>
> I'd like to know more on that exact question as well.
>
> Lehmann's book on PIE syntax
> <http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/pies00.html> has
> something on the matter; he ascribes it to PIE having been an OV
> language and the switch to SVO in the daughter languages (which he
> calls "the dialects").
>
> I just started reading the online version of this book; I did not
> find a real answer there yet, in particular why OV should imply the
> middle, but I am confident something is in one of the many chapters
> I did not read yet.

Hm. I used to think the grown-ups had all the answers too, if you'll
pardon the simile. I should have thought of my own solution above
(middle as once impersonal, with transition of focused NP to
nominative from dative or instrumental) a long time ago. Estonian has
an impersonal voice, which of course exists only in the 3rd person
'sind oodatakse' "you are expected", cf 'sa ootad' "you wait". Note
that the subject 'you' in 'you are expected' is in the partitive
('sind') in Estonian, a case that is used for the non-existent
accusative (similarly to what is the case in Slavic languages); the
equivalent (bad) German would be 'Dich ist erwartet'. For that matter,
the PPIE impersonal voice which became the PIE middle might have been
construed with an accusative too.


Torsten