From: Joachim Pense
Message: 47580
Date: 2007-02-24
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:As in German idioms: "mich friert", "mich dürstet"?
>>
>> --- 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.
>
> Tsk, tsk. I just learned that what is the passive in Latin was in
> Oscan and Umbrian an impersonal which existed only in the 3sg and 3pl
> and which took the 'subject' in the accusative, just as is the case in
> Estonian.
>