2497: Antipassive Voice Oct 13, 2021

People might be familiar with the active and passive voice—and fans of Word Facts may remember discussion of the passival [1]—but less likely to be acquainted with the antipassive voice. This doesn't really exist in Indo-European languages, and instead is a feature mostly of ergative-absolutive languages [2]. The reason for this is that while the passive voice deletes the agent and promotes the object to be the subject, the antipassive operates by deleting the object of the sentence, and promoting the agent. This might sound like it would just be a normal active form then—hence the term 'antipassive'—but in ergative-absolutive languages, the subject takes different endings depending upon whether there is an object of the verb. In this way, the antipassive promotes a noun that would take the ergative case to be in the absolutive.

[2] https://www.wordfacts.org/blog/2017/10/1048-no-subjects-in-ergative-languages.html

2162: Deponent Verbs Nov 15, 2020

Latin, a language whose grammar is notoriously simple to learn (...) has passive-voice deponents: verbs which are passive in form but active in meaning. For instance, the normal active ending for 1st person singular is -o (present tense) or -āvī (perfect aspect) but these do not exist for verbs like 'loquī' (to speak), 'verērī' (to fear), or 'blandīrī' (to flatter) and so on. In these cases, it would look like:

'loquor' (I speak) or 'hortātus sum' (I have exhorted) which would normally indicate the passive. These verbs have lost their active forms to history, and so given there is only one form, there is no way to use them to indicate the passive; one would need to opt for a synonym. It is not the only one to feature these verbs of course, but the list of these others is not too long either, including North Germanic languages like Danish, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit.