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English ,the less Germanic of the ... ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3813 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 49 of 52 04 February 2014 at 11:12pm | IP Logged |
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That German may allow for dative objects to become subjects in this particular situation as an exception.
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| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4625 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 50 of 52 04 February 2014 at 11:30pm | IP Logged |
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It doesn't.
Although the construction can only be translated in the passive voice from an English speaker's point of view, it's definitely active voice to a native German speaker. Please don't make me repeat this again! EDIT: By the way, where's the logic in your argumentation? On the one hand, you say English constructions can't be translated directly into German, but on the other hand you say German passive might work like English passive in one (!) special case. To my mind, that's a non-sequitur. Edited by Josquin on 04 February 2014 at 11:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4071 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 51 of 52 05 February 2014 at 2:22am | IP Logged |
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If I remember correctly, English cancelled þou and ye in favour of "you",
which is the dative and accusative of the plural "ye". So English basically used an accusative and dative form of a plural second person form for all forms of second- person address. Second person singular in Middle English and earlier: "þou give me the book." "I give þee the book." Second person plural: "Ye give me the book." "I give you the book." Second person singular and plural in Modern English: "You give me the book." "I give you the book." The dative can be used in poor grammar in English, "Him being late was a problem", whereby the correct form is to use a possessive that precedes the gerund, i.e. "His being late was a problem". Edited by 1e4e6 on 05 February 2014 at 2:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6484 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 52 of 52 05 February 2014 at 6:36am | IP Logged |
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When a case system collapses it isn't necessarily syntactic factors that decide the outcome - for instance the accusative ousted the nominative in French nouns, but that didn't mean that all subjects suddenly became objects while this process was going on. As for the process surround the 2. person in English I became intrigued enough to check it out, and in one of the weird old books on my shelves (Wardale's Old English Grammar) I found that Old English actually had a dual which eerily resembles the surviving forms in German:
( Nom, Acc, Gen, Dative): 1. person sing.: ic, mec/mĕ, mīn, mĕ 1. person dual: wit, unc/uncit, uncer, unc 1. person plural.: wĕ, ūsic/ūs, ūser/ūre, ūs 2. person sing.: ðŭ, ðec/ðe, ðin, ðĕ 2. person dual: ȝit, inc/incit, incer, inc 2. person plural.: ȝĕ, ēowic/ēow/īow, ēower/īower, ēow/īow One interesting feature of these tables is that the original accusatives were ousted by the datives - again a supposedly less important case won, but the sentence structures weren't suddenly turned around because of this. As for the general demise of the 2. p. singular I don't know whether there ever was a period where the plural pronoun was combined with a singular verb - but probbably not, as the examples from other languages show that polited forms generally are combined with the syntactically correct verbal form. As for Stolan's examples they have a superficial ressemblance with passive constructions insofar that you can add an explicit agens with the preposition "by" - but when you then try to formulate the corresponding sentence with this agens as its subject then the original subjects ends up as anything but its subject: I want it fixed. --> Somebody should fix it .. that's what I want (and that's my only role in this) I saw it passed around --> Somebody passed it around and I saw this happen I saw it get passed around --> Something was passed around and I saw this happen ---> Somebody passed something around and I saw this happen I was given a book --> Somebody gave me a book This bed has been slept in --> Somebody has slept in this bed Dogs are said to be smarter than cats --> Some say that dogs are smarter than cats If we have a true passive like "The house was painted (red) by me" then the agens (me) will become the new subject: "I painted the house (red)". You could 'stolanize' this: "I did something to make the house become red". The common denominator for Stolan's examples is that the subject does something, and then something else happens/has happened/is the case or whatever - and it would be a miracle if all these quite diverse cases could be constructed in exactly the same form in any other language. Take an example in the opposite direction: "mir wurde gesagt daß ..." where German for once permits a subjectless sentence (or rather a sentence that dispenses with a dummy - the true subject is the subordinate clause). But it sounds funny in English because there isn't a dative form in English: *"me was said that...". Edited by Iversen on 05 February 2014 at 6:50am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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