4 ms·

In Latin, deponent verbs are verbs which are written in the passive form but have an active meaning. The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in En

by mrkeen 4y ago

In Latin, deponent verbs are verbs which are written in the passive form but have an active meaning. The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. But it got me thinking, it must all be relative. Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), but it's not how the word is used. But French has the active "naître" as "to be born". Does that mean French speakers think that English has deponent verbs?

pm3003 4y ago
I speak French and studied Latin. We have so many language oddities (and of course 'exceptions confirm the rule') that we're not so quick to judge English. The case of 'naître' is interesting. Naître is mostly used in the past (I/he was born). The direct translation is also in French its common past form 'Je suis né', which would also be the same as a passive voice, though in the present ('I am born' but the meaning wouldn't make much sense in French). In the end, 'I was born' appears very logical to young French students (typically 9 to 12 years old depending on school and chosen language). It's usually taught at first as idiomatic. Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?
- mrkeen 4y ago
  As a French speaker, do you feel that 'manquer' is the wrong way around (subject and object reversed)? Or does English have it backward? It's easy enough to just flip subject and object when translating, but I never gave much thought to how it would work in the passive voice. I tried a few examples with Google Translate, but perhaps it's even more confused than I am: I miss him. => Il me manque. He misses me. => Il me manque. I am missed by him => Il me manque. He is missed by me. => Il me manque.
  - mmarq 4y ago
    I don't speak French, but in Italian you can't have intransitive passive verbs. `manque` is intransitive, `me` in not a direct object. I'd expect French and Italian to be similar here.
  - pm3003 4y ago
    'Manquer' translates well to 'miss' when you miss the bus or a target, you're lacking something ('cette veste manque un bouton') or a quality ('il manque de courage'). Manquer has also a passive meaning (Pierre manque -> Pierre is missing) but Google's problem here is different. >'Il me manque' = 'he's missing to me' This seems logical to me. The French 'me' in this case is a dative or 'indirect object' form. >He's missing me (while shooting at me) = il me manque The French 'me' in this case is an accusative or 'direct object' form. The passive voice 'Je suis manqué par lui' = 'I am missed by him' /'Il est manqué par moi' = 'He is missed by me' would be unusual in French and necessarily 'directly transitive', so referring to missing someone with a pistol for example. The difference between the two can be made by using the 3rd person or the indirect complement. >Il me manque (I long for him) => Il lui manque (he/she misses him, the dative 'lui' being epicene) >Il me manque (He missed me, as with a pistol) => il le manque (he misses him, as with a pistol) 'Il me manque' (I long for him) can be developed into 'Il manque à moi' (he's missing to me). 'Il me manque' (he misses me while shooting at me) cannot. This intuitive trick is taught to children so they can make the difference in more complicated cases, but it doesn't work well with second language students.
  - wazoox 4y ago
    Weird translations... I miss him => Il me manque. He misses me => Je lui manque. Passive forms aren't used. However you may use the quite old-fashioned "languir" as an alternative form: I am missed by him => Il se languit de moi. He is missed by me => Je me languit de lui.
- Mlller 4y ago
  “Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?” Both “bist geboren” and “wurdest geboren” are in wide-spread use, some German speakers prefer the one, some the other variant – e.g. https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThread=980247&lang=en https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThrea... – but not under all circumstances: - “wurdest geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “werden” is called “Vorgangspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing an event’. - “bist geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “sein” is called “Zustandspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing a state’. A minimal pair: - “Die Tür wird geöffnet” = ‘The door is opened’. - “Die Tür ist geöffnet” ≈ ‘The door (has been opened and) is open’ (There is also “Die Tür ist offen” = ‘The door is open’). So “wurdest geboren” and “bist geboren” offer two different perspectives (with a difference that often doesnʼt really matter): - “Wann wurdest du geboren?” focuses on the past event of having been born at a certain time. - “Wann bist du geboren?” focuses on the personʼs property to be now a person that was born at a certain time (a property, in the end, like age or weight maybe). So the latter is rather not used for dead persons: “Kant wurde 1724 geboren” is much preferred over “Kant ist 1724 geboren”. (If students of the German language donʼt want to memorize much here, they can, as often with German, happily apply the postmodern motto “anything goes”, plus there is probably some dialect anyway in which the form you use is the right one since the middle ages :-)
bradrn 4y ago
> Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? Yes: it’s all based on the syntax of the single language in question. Latin has very distinct active and passive conjugations [0]; we know they’re active and passive because of the effect they have on the case assignations. Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations. More generally, categories like ‘deponent’ have to be justified language-internally. If you can only identify a category with reference to another language, it’s probably not of any relevance in the grammar of the language you’re studying [1]. [0] There’s a nice table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation#Regular_conjugations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation#Regular_conj... [1] https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810206.006 https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810206.006 is an excellent overview of this, though unfortunately paywalled.
- mrkeen 4y ago
  > Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations. That makes more sense. I learned deponent as "Active meaning, passive conjugation". It's only the "meaning" part that I think is subjective and/or relative.
  - bradrn 4y ago
    Well, to be honest I’m not quite sure… I never studied Latin. But ‘active meaning’ means very little, as far as I can tell, precisely because it can differ so much even within a single language, to say nothing of how it varies between languages.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    >> Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations. > That makes more sense. It's also not quite correct; Latin deponent verbs don't have finite active forms, or active infinitives, but they may have active participles. As to whether it makes sense to distinguish "active meaning" from the form of the verb... There is an important piece of Latin syntax exclusively available to deponent verbs, which justifies the description of "active meaning". Latin has three tenses, past, present, and future. An ordinary Latin verb has a full set of active and passive forms for each of two aspects in each tense. But a Latin verb only has four participles. They are traditionally known as: present active, perfect passive, future active, and future passive. This is a far cry from the twelve you'd expect. (3 tenses × 2 aspects × 2 voices.) We'll ignore aspect, but the fact that the active voice is missing in the "past tense" in Latin's participial system has a very interesting consequence. The Latin verb sequor means "follow". It is deponent, and you might choose to think of it as meaning "be led". However, its perfect participle secutus might mean one of two things: 1. It could mean "having followed", a perfect active participial form which is not available to non-deponent Latin verbs. On the analysis where there's no such thing as "active meaning", this is the only interpretation that it should be possible for secutus to have. If sequi [present passive infinitive] means "to follow" and not "to be followed", then secutus [perfect passive participle] should mean "having followed" and not "having been followed". 2. But in fact secutus might also mean "having been followed", passivizing the meaning of the already-grammatically-passive verb. This strongly suggests that native speakers of Latin thought of sequor in terms similar to "passive form, active meaning". The other reason you might think of deponents as having "active meaning" is that they take direct objects. This is a weaker line of argument, since it's possible for a verb to take multiple direct objects, so there's no real problem with the passive form of such a verb (with two original objects) promoting one of them to subject and keeping the other one as an object. Compare English "I was given a gift", where I is promoted from its position as primary direct object in "[He] gave me a gift", versus "A gift was given to me", where the only direct object of "[He] gave a gift to me" is promoted.
andrewshadura 4y ago
> English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), but it's not how the word is used. Can you please explain? I don't see this verb being used in active voice almost at all.
- bradrn 4y ago
  It’s somewhat archaic, but you do see people ‘bearing a child’ on occasion.
  - andrewshadura 4y ago
    Yes, but in most common usage it's in passive voice, but the comment I'm replying to suggests otherwise.
- pjc50 4y ago
  https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/borne-vs-born-difference-usage-spelling https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/borne-vs-born-... - it's rather complicated.
- mrkeen 4y ago
  > I don't see this verb being used in active voice Yes, passive voice, but active meaning. Which was why I was suggesting it was deponent. "He was born; he lived; he died" <- Three clauses describing what he (actively) did. If it were active voice: "His mother bore him".
thaumasiotes 4y ago
"To be born" is a deponent verb in English. Your textbook was just wrong. "To get married" might be analyzed as a deponent verb too, but you can also say it's parallel to "to get ready".
dghf 4y ago
> The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. Some regional dialects of British English allow the use of “stood” for “standing”. E.g., “he is stood over there” = “he is standing over there”. Likewise for “sit”: “we were sat by the bar” = “we were sitting by the bar”. I don’t know if those technically count as deponent verbs, but they look a bit like them.

by mrkeen 4y ago

pm3003 4y ago

I speak French and studied Latin. We have so many language oddities (and of course 'exceptions confirm the rule') that we're not so quick to judge English. The case of 'naître' is interesting. Naître is mostly used in the past (I/he was born). The direct translation is also in French its common past form 'Je suis né', which would also be the same as a passive voice, though in the present ('I am born' but the meaning wouldn't make much sense in French). In the end, 'I was born' appears very logical to young French students (typically 9 to 12 years old depending on school and chosen language). It's usually taught at first as idiomatic. Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?

mrkeen 4y ago
As a French speaker, do you feel that 'manquer' is the wrong way around (subject and object reversed)? Or does English have it backward? It's easy enough to just flip subject and object when translating, but I never gave much thought to how it would work in the passive voice. I tried a few examples with Google Translate, but perhaps it's even more confused than I am: I miss him. => Il me manque. He misses me. => Il me manque. I am missed by him => Il me manque. He is missed by me. => Il me manque.
- mmarq 4y ago
  I don't speak French, but in Italian you can't have intransitive passive verbs. `manque` is intransitive, `me` in not a direct object. I'd expect French and Italian to be similar here.
- pm3003 4y ago
  'Manquer' translates well to 'miss' when you miss the bus or a target, you're lacking something ('cette veste manque un bouton') or a quality ('il manque de courage'). Manquer has also a passive meaning (Pierre manque -> Pierre is missing) but Google's problem here is different. >'Il me manque' = 'he's missing to me' This seems logical to me. The French 'me' in this case is a dative or 'indirect object' form. >He's missing me (while shooting at me) = il me manque The French 'me' in this case is an accusative or 'direct object' form. The passive voice 'Je suis manqué par lui' = 'I am missed by him' /'Il est manqué par moi' = 'He is missed by me' would be unusual in French and necessarily 'directly transitive', so referring to missing someone with a pistol for example. The difference between the two can be made by using the 3rd person or the indirect complement. >Il me manque (I long for him) => Il lui manque (he/she misses him, the dative 'lui' being epicene) >Il me manque (He missed me, as with a pistol) => il le manque (he misses him, as with a pistol) 'Il me manque' (I long for him) can be developed into 'Il manque à moi' (he's missing to me). 'Il me manque' (he misses me while shooting at me) cannot. This intuitive trick is taught to children so they can make the difference in more complicated cases, but it doesn't work well with second language students.
- wazoox 4y ago
  Weird translations... I miss him => Il me manque. He misses me => Je lui manque. Passive forms aren't used. However you may use the quite old-fashioned "languir" as an alternative form: I am missed by him => Il se languit de moi. He is missed by me => Je me languit de lui.
Mlller 4y ago
“Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?” Both “bist geboren” and “wurdest geboren” are in wide-spread use, some German speakers prefer the one, some the other variant – e.g. https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThread=980247&lang=en https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThrea... – but not under all circumstances: - “wurdest geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “werden” is called “Vorgangspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing an event’. - “bist geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “sein” is called “Zustandspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing a state’. A minimal pair: - “Die Tür wird geöffnet” = ‘The door is opened’. - “Die Tür ist geöffnet” ≈ ‘The door (has been opened and) is open’ (There is also “Die Tür ist offen” = ‘The door is open’). So “wurdest geboren” and “bist geboren” offer two different perspectives (with a difference that often doesnʼt really matter): - “Wann wurdest du geboren?” focuses on the past event of having been born at a certain time. - “Wann bist du geboren?” focuses on the personʼs property to be now a person that was born at a certain time (a property, in the end, like age or weight maybe). So the latter is rather not used for dead persons: “Kant wurde 1724 geboren” is much preferred over “Kant ist 1724 geboren”. (If students of the German language donʼt want to memorize much here, they can, as often with German, happily apply the postmodern motto “anything goes”, plus there is probably some dialect anyway in which the form you use is the right one since the middle ages :-)

bradrn 4y ago

> Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? Yes: it’s all based on the syntax of the single language in question. Latin has very distinct active and passive conjugations [0]; we know they’re active and passive because of the effect they have on the case assignations. Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations. More generally, categories like ‘deponent’ have to be justified language-internally. If you can only identify a category with reference to another language, it’s probably not of any relevance in the grammar of the language you’re studying [1]. [0] There’s a nice table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation#Regular_conjugations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation#Regular_conj... [1] https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810206.006 https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810206.006 is an excellent overview of this, though unfortunately paywalled.

mrkeen 4y ago
> Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations. That makes more sense. I learned deponent as "Active meaning, passive conjugation". It's only the "meaning" part that I think is subjective and/or relative.
- bradrn 4y ago
  Well, to be honest I’m not quite sure… I never studied Latin. But ‘active meaning’ means very little, as far as I can tell, precisely because it can differ so much even within a single language, to say nothing of how it varies between languages.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  >> Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations. > That makes more sense. It's also not quite correct; Latin deponent verbs don't have finite active forms, or active infinitives, but they may have active participles. As to whether it makes sense to distinguish "active meaning" from the form of the verb... There is an important piece of Latin syntax exclusively available to deponent verbs, which justifies the description of "active meaning". Latin has three tenses, past, present, and future. An ordinary Latin verb has a full set of active and passive forms for each of two aspects in each tense. But a Latin verb only has four participles. They are traditionally known as: present active, perfect passive, future active, and future passive. This is a far cry from the twelve you'd expect. (3 tenses × 2 aspects × 2 voices.) We'll ignore aspect, but the fact that the active voice is missing in the "past tense" in Latin's participial system has a very interesting consequence. The Latin verb sequor means "follow". It is deponent, and you might choose to think of it as meaning "be led". However, its perfect participle secutus might mean one of two things: 1. It could mean "having followed", a perfect active participial form which is not available to non-deponent Latin verbs. On the analysis where there's no such thing as "active meaning", this is the only interpretation that it should be possible for secutus to have. If sequi [present passive infinitive] means "to follow" and not "to be followed", then secutus [perfect passive participle] should mean "having followed" and not "having been followed". 2. But in fact secutus might also mean "having been followed", passivizing the meaning of the already-grammatically-passive verb. This strongly suggests that native speakers of Latin thought of sequor in terms similar to "passive form, active meaning". The other reason you might think of deponents as having "active meaning" is that they take direct objects. This is a weaker line of argument, since it's possible for a verb to take multiple direct objects, so there's no real problem with the passive form of such a verb (with two original objects) promoting one of them to subject and keeping the other one as an object. Compare English "I was given a gift", where I is promoted from its position as primary direct object in "[He] gave me a gift", versus "A gift was given to me", where the only direct object of "[He] gave a gift to me" is promoted.

andrewshadura 4y ago

> English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), but it's not how the word is used. Can you please explain? I don't see this verb being used in active voice almost at all.

bradrn 4y ago
It’s somewhat archaic, but you do see people ‘bearing a child’ on occasion.
- andrewshadura 4y ago
  Yes, but in most common usage it's in passive voice, but the comment I'm replying to suggests otherwise.
pjc50 4y ago
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/borne-vs-born-difference-usage-spelling https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/borne-vs-born-... - it's rather complicated.
mrkeen 4y ago
> I don't see this verb being used in active voice Yes, passive voice, but active meaning. Which was why I was suggesting it was deponent. "He was born; he lived; he died" <- Three clauses describing what he (actively) did. If it were active voice: "His mother bore him".

thaumasiotes 4y ago

"To be born" is a deponent verb in English. Your textbook was just wrong. "To get married" might be analyzed as a deponent verb too, but you can also say it's parallel to "to get ready".

dghf 4y ago

> The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. Some regional dialects of British English allow the use of “stood” for “standing”. E.g., “he is stood over there” = “he is standing over there”. Likewise for “sit”: “we were sat by the bar” = “we were sitting by the bar”. I don’t know if those technically count as deponent verbs, but they look a bit like them.