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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer)
Subject: Latin Passives Taking D.Os???
Message-ID: <D6Co22.DF4@indirect.com>
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Organization: Department of Redundancy Department
Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 09:37:14 GMT
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Not so very long ago, whistle485@aol.com (Whistle485) said...

>Can a passive take a direct object (accusative case)??

  Not in Latin.

> I came up with the following example: "She is given the gift".  This is
> a perfect third person singular passive. 

  Yes, but only in English.  This sentence, in the active voice, would be 
"Someone gives her the gift."  Note that the verb has two objects:  "her", 
the indirect object, and "gift", the direct object.
  A pecularity of English is that you can form a passive sentence, with 
=either= of these object as the subject.

  * She is given the gift.   [indirect object made the subject]
  * The gift is given her.   [direct object made the subject, but notice 
that this sounds =so= weird, that nearly all English speakers would have 
to insert the preposition "to" before "her"]

  In Latin, the active sentence would have the word for "her" in the 
dative case, and this sentence can't be reworked into the passive, with 
"she" as the subject.

>I asked my Latin teacher about it, and he still hasn't been able to find
>the answer.  He suspects that, in my first example, "donum" would be
>translated into the dative of indirect object, but he's not sure.

  That sentence, in the passive, would be something like my second 
English example above.  That is, "gift" can be the subject, with a 
passive verb, but "to-her" remains in the dative.  All you can get is 
"Donum eae datur."  [I'm not sure about the pronoun "eae"; I meant the 
dative case of "ea".  Hey.  It's been thirty years, and I've forgotten a 
lot.  Okay?]

>Can someone help me with this?  Can a passive latin verb (in any tense)
>take a direct object???

CAN OF WORMS ALERT!!!  CAN OF WORMS ALERT!!!  CAN OF WORMS ALERT!!!

  Well, no, not really, but you can make a sentence that =looks= like it 
has a passive verb with a direct object.

  "Cohortor fratrem meum."  ==>  "I encourage my brother."

  This is because the verb "cohortor/cohortari/cohortatus sum" is deponent
(because it has "put away" its active voice); that is, it has =only= a
passive form, and no active form, but that passive form has an active
meaning. 
  I originally reasoned that somehow, the Latin mind really thought of
this as some passive action, and the subject of the verb was receiving
this action passively.  Most deponent verbs have intransitive English
translations, so a direct object doesn't make sense, anyway.  ("arbitror" 
= "I think"; "loquor" = "I speak").  But good old C.J.Caesar used
"cohortor" with a direct object in his commentaries on the Punic Wars: 
"Cohortatus suos, proelium commisit."  ==> "Having encouraged his own
[troops], he began combat."  Here, the word is a passive participle with a
direct object.  A no-no for normal verbs, but it looks like you can get
away with it when you use a deponent verb. 

-- 
                              ==----=                    Steve MacGregor
                             ([.] [.])                     Phoenix, AZ
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        Help stamp out, eliminate, and abolish redundancy!
