[Multilingual Monday] Passiveness

[aadroma]

Today's Multilingual Monday covers the passive voice. It's used in English quite a bit -- "The meal was cooked by my husband; isn't it great?" "I was robbed by two men." "I got fired for looking at porn in the office." Here the focus isn't on the ACTIONS, but the RESULTS -- the meal is done, and that's because of the husband in example one. The person in number two no longer has a purse, or a wallet, or pants, or something; he WAS robbed, and it's done, and he's now in a state where that happened and he was a passive participant; it happened TO him. And the third example? Yeah, the guy is now jobless because he can't stay off X-Tube at work, but the focus isn't on his looking, but rather the fact that he's now without work. The passive can also be used to state activities that aren't currently happening but are general facts -- Hindi is spoken in India, kanji is studied by Japanese grade school students, Korean was once written vertically. Here there are no specific instances happening; you're just making a general statement.

This will NOT, by any means, cover the exact uses in all languages of the passive, but rather cover unique uses in several languages of the passive voice:

The Spanish passive is a frequently seen example -- one passive construction is, interestingly enough, made by making the verb reflexive, to tell about general facts or to give instructions. By now everyone in the States has seen Se habla español -- "Spanish is spoken," the se here making the verb reflexive (seen in verbs like bañarse, "to bathe oneself"). This construction can also be used to indicate that the party in question had no choice in the resulting action -- Se me ha colgado el ordenador, "My computer froze" (lit. "My computer to me froze itself") or, even more "irresponsibly," Se me ha olvidado mi contraseña, "I forgot my password" (lit. "My password to me forgot itself").

Japanese has a separate verb conjugation for the passive -- the verb 食べる, taberu ("to eat") becomes 食べられる, taberareru ("to be eaten"), with -eru or -rareru endings. In the sample sentence 僕は犬に手を噛まれた。, Boku wa inu ni te wo komareta, "My hand was bitten by a dog." the agent is marked by ni and komareta is the past tense passive form of komu, "to bite". Even in relative clauses the passive is common -- コード化されたデータ, koodo kasareta deita, "Data that's been codified," literally "Code-change be-made data". The most unique passive use I've seen is that intransitive verbs like die can be made passive, with the connotation of suffering. See あの子は両親に死なれた。, ano ko wa royshin ni shinareta, "That child suffered the death of both of his parents," with shinareta being the passive form of shinu, "to die".

Some languages lack an actual passive form -- in Basque this is technically an impossibility and one needs to be creative; either a.) make the sentence active (Ikasle guztiek ezagutzen dute liburu hori - "All students know that book," which can also be interpreted as "That book is known by all students"), or b.) "eliminating" the subject (taking the same verb as above, ezagutzen dute, "they know it," you can make ezagutzen da, which is "is known" ... kind of. Again, NO agent can be mentioned here because, well, you just killed the subject. :: laugh ::).

Do you have other interesting uses or quirks of the passive? By all means, please share them!