Re: Transitive / Intransitive / Stative and Voice

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002 19:26:47 +0200 (MET DST), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
<jer@...> wrote:

>This has all been said before,

May I ask by whom (except me)?

>but where is the evidence that the thematic
>conjugation was once transitive as opposed to an intransitive athematic
>counterpart?

Nowhere.

>Would such evidence not be common knowledge by now if it were
>really true?

Not necessarily, of course. Maybe we've been overlooking something. Or there
are other Tocharians and Hittites (unlikely, but still one never knows).

>I suspect the "evidence" is only in the structural analysis
>of some non-IE languages. The irrelevance should be evident.
>
>I guess the problem has been like this: Some languages mark the object
>role in the transitive verbal forms. IE has a funny thematic vowel of
>unclear function, what was it originally? Hey, couldn't it have been an
>object marker? No, it could not, for we know what it was - it was a marker
>of syntactic subordination ("subjunctive").

It certainly was. The question is whether all thematic verbs are old
subjunctives. Can the tudáti-type be explained as a subjunctive? It doesn't
look like one, accent-wise.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...