[B-Greek] Middle and Passive Voice

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Sat Aug 26 13:06:34 EDT 2006


On 25/08/2006, at 5:30 PM, wayfaringman at netzero.net wrote:
> Does anyone know how the idea of  separate middle and passive forms
> for the Aorist and Future tenses originated? It's in the textbooks,
> but how did it get there I wonder? Thanks for any help you can give.

Are you asking how the forms themselves originated or how the  
semantic distinction between middle and passive developed? Your  
phrasing of the question suggests they are one in the same thing but  
I think it's important to keep the two separate.

Proto-Indo-European, both semantically and formally had two voices:  
active and middle. The middle voice indicated that the subject was  
more affected by the action: e.g. it was done to oneself, or for  
oneself. While any verb could theoretically have both an active and  
middle form depending on how affected the subject was, it is easy to  
see why some verbs might only (or at least predominantly) use an  
active or middle form. It should be noted that this in no way means  
the verb should be considered "defective" any more than English  
intransitive verbs should because they can't be put in the passive.

PIE didn't have a form corresponding to a true passive. Nor is there  
any indication, as far as I know, that it distinguished a passive  
sense semantically. (For this reason I think it's better, for PIE at  
least, to call the form middle and not middle-passive). However,  
various languages descended from PIE independently developed ways of  
expressing a passive sense.  Some languages developed a passive from  
the middle form. Others developed it from things like stative  
constructions. For example, in English consider "the window was  
broken" which could be either stative ("was the window intact? no,  
the window was broken") or passive ("the window was broken by some  
kids").

I am not convinced that so-called "passive" forms of the aorist  
developed specifically as a means of expressing the passive sense.  
They don't always mean passive in our literature and my understanding  
is they certainly don't in Homer. I think it's more likely the -QH-  
and (especially) -H- forms initially had some other meaning (the  
latter relating to the stative, for example, as suggested in Sihler).  
The middle form in general started to take on an occasional passive  
sense and, over time, the -(Q)-H forms were favoured (although not  
exclusively) for this in the aorist.

I'm not sure that the separate "middle" versus "passive" forms (or in  
his terminology MP1 and MP2) are really any different from, say, the  
distinction between 1st and 2nd aorist, although I'd be interested to  
know if Carl Conrad thinks me off base for this analogy.


James Tauber




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