tommjames:

jchthys:I think there’s not much need for a passive in Esperanto. Sure, some might find it ‘useful’, but it’s not really necessary with the accusative.

Ahhh, we have an Aktivismano in our midst! If you don't already know about it, you may be interesed to learn about the philosophy of Aktivismo which was dreamed up by Marko Rauhamaa, the guy who runs the Free Esperanto Course at pacujo.net. There's not a great deal of material online to read about it but I did manage to find some discussion on the subject between him and Bertilo on the Google Groups

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Soc/soc....

The essense is getting rid of the passive and just making greater use of the accusative, and oni. Bertilo seems against such a move, and I'm with him on that as the passive, useless though it may be in many situations, does have a few stylistic and disambiguation benefits albeit in a limited number of scenarios.

I didn’t realize this was a fringe group with a name…I always assumed this was standard good style, so as not to waste words and actually make use of the maligned accusative.

I’m not for getting rid of the passive, but I do think it’s often more elegant just to use an inverted active.

jchthys:Of course an atist would recommend the use of estis murdadata for an imperfect aspect…

Actually they wouldn't, at least I'm led to believe that by what I've read, particularly by Bertilo. In this little essay Bertilo is quoted as follows:

Bertilo:Laŭ itisto li estis vundata signifas, ke oni parolas pri longa vundado aŭ pri ripetata vundado, kaj tute ignoras la finon de la ago, kaj ties rezulton. Atisto tamen neas tion, kaj asertas, ke AT ne esprimas ion pri daŭro, sed nur esprimas la signifon ĝuste tiam (nek antaŭe, nek poste).

According to itists li estis vundata means that you're talking about a wounding that lasts over some time or about a repeating wounding, and totally ignores the end of the action, and it's result. However atists deny that and say that AT shows nothing about duration, but instead shows only the meaning just at that time (not before, not after).

I would read "ignores the end of the action" as imperfective, and thus it would seem in that interpretation that atists do indeed lose the imperfect aspect, in the same way the the "normal Esperanto" usage of vundita loses the perfective aspect when it is used for the passive of becoming.

In Ido, mi trovesis means the passive of becoming I was found, or I got found.

For practical purposes, is the Ido -es better than the Eo "-igxis"? I can only translate "Mi trovigxis" as "I was found," or "I got found." The -es looks like a middle voice construction.

Is it bad style to use "ek" to imply the passive of becoming? Here's the first line on "ek" from the Reta Vortaro:

Aspekta prefikso signifanta ke procezo aŭ stato komenciĝas subite kaj prcize je koncerna momento:

I don't really want the "subite" part, but "prcize je koncerna momento" helps:

"JKF estis ekmurdita en 1963."

Is the "ek" stupid and redundant here? It definitely places the murder in 1963, but we don't really need to be told that it happened "subite."

The -es looks like a middle voice construction.

I don't know much about Ido so I'm unable to advise on whether or not es can function in the middle voice. Perhaps others can comment, but for the purpose of the discussion I don't suppose it matters. One can posit a suffix that would work in a purely passive-of-becoming way, and that's essentially the suffix I'm alluding to, whether it exists in Ido or not.

:I can only translate "Mi trovigxis" as "I was found," or "I got found."

Indeed. That's because in English we have no other choice than to use the passive construction, short of more literal (and ugly) translations like "came into a found state".

Troviĝis does not mean "got found" but rather the middle voice notion of "came into a found state". This concept may be a little difficult to grasp, principally because the verb to find is not 'ergative' in English. To make that a bit clearer, referring back to the earlier example with rompi, the verb "to break" is ergative, because something can break transitively, and just break (come into a broken state) as in the sentence the branch broke. This sentence will be a lot more comprehensible to an English speaker than the equivalent form of The book found. Books don't "find". They -get- found. Why? There's no reason. It's just a convention of English that some verbs can work reflexively and some don't.

The point is that this arbitrary lexicality doesn't exist in Esperanto. In theory any transitive verb can be put into the middle voice with iĝ. Whether or not the meaning of such forms will be immediately obvious to speakers of other languages is another matter and will depend largely on the degree to which the corresponding verbs are able to work the same way in the mother tongue. Part of the confusion with iĝ with English speakers is that so many corresponding forms to verbs like troviĝi will be strictly passive in English, which leads to the mistake of thinking it's passive in Esperanto too.

Is it bad style to use "ek" to imply the passive of becoming?

It's not something I've ever seen. I imagine it may well have the effect you're looking for in some cases but on the whole it looks like it might add more confusion and possibility to change the meaning of the verb in an undesirable way.

English verbs can sometimes have this intransitivity without a suffix. Take “burn”, for example. I could say I burned the paper (transitive verb), but also The paper burned for five seconds (intransitive verb). This last sentence doesn’t imply that someone burned the paper—just that the paper came into a state of becoming burnt.

In Esperanto, the first sentence would be Mi bruligis la paperon. The second would be La papero bruliĝis dum kvin sekundoj. If I were to say The paper was burnt by someone clumsy I would not use bruliĝis, but rather a passive (estis bruligita/bruligata) or an aktivisma wording.

jchthys:In Esperanto, the first sentence would be Mi brulis la paperon. The second would be La papero bruliĝis dum kvin sekundoj. If I were to say The paper was burnt by someone clumsy I would not use bruliĝis, but rather a passive (estis brulita/brulata) or an aktivisma wording.

You are absolutely right in the essence of what you are saying, however you have the forms slightly wrong because bruli is actually an intransitive verb in Esperanto. Where you have brulis la paperon and la papero bruliĝis, what you need are the respective forms of bruligis la paperon and la papero brulis.

In the same way, brulita and brulata need to be bruligita and bruligata.

Thanks for correcting me on that. I really should have double-checked and used a different verb to exemplify.

Thank you both for the comments. I didn't know the word "ergative," but I see that it was the
ergative verbs (to break, to close) that were giving me trouble.

One more semi-fix:

JFK estis murdita en 1963,

JFK estis murdito en 1993.

I took a week to ponder our discussion, and came up with various pharisaical justifications for the doublethink needed to use words like "fermita" and "rompita" as pure adjectives. I just couldn't completely convince myself.

I don't know much about Ido so I'm unable to advise on whether or not es can function in the middle voice.

I did read about the -es "state of being" suffix in Ido. Idists use it as part of a contracted verb form much like the Esperanto version:

Ido: ruptesas --- esas ruptita
Esperanto: rompitas --- estas rompita.

One Ido dictionary gives "ruptar" as both transitive and intransitive, but since "ruptita" is a passive participle, it must correspond to the transitive phase of the verb. So it appears to me that "ruptesas" still implies that someone broke the window.

Yeah, I am fine with it. It would be even better to have two unambiguous forms, one for being and one for becoming, but I can live with one form that covers both. We have the same ambiguity in English.

I am recanting. "La fermita pordo," seems unambiguously to mean "The was-closed-by someone-or-something door," and not "The in-a-state-of-closedness door." By asserting that "esti + passive participle" covers all passive forms, I'd say that Zamenhof implicitly but arbitrarily extended the definitions of various passive participles. He could do that since he was the arbiter, but I would have preferred that it be made explicit in the rules of Esperanto.

By the way, if "Mi turnis min mem," can I describe myself in all three of the following ways?

(1) "turninta," (because I turned something -- min),

(2) "turnita," (because something -- mi -- turned me),

and

(3) "turniĝinta," (because I turned)?

Thanks.