Fourth Person in Finnic Languages
Some languages do not contrast voices, but have other interesting constructions similar to this. For example, Finnic languages such as Finnish and Estonian have a "passive", expressed by conjugating the verb in a never-mentioned "common person". Although it is generally referred to as the passive ("passiivi") in Finnish grammars, it may more appropriately be referred to as the fourth-person form of a verb.
The function of the fourth person is simply to leave out the agent. The agent is almost always human and never mentioned. The grammatical role of the object remains unaltered, and thus transitivity may also be used. For example, the fourth-person construction Ikkuna hajotettiin, with a transitive verb, means "Someone broke the window", while the third-person construction Ikkuna hajosi uses the anticausative and means "The window broke".
Read more about this topic: Voice (grammar)
Famous quotes containing the words fourth, person and/or languages:
“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”
—Bible: Hebrew Exodus, 20:8-11.
The fourth commandment.
“It amazes me when I hear any person prefer blindness to deafness. Such a person must have a terrible dread of being alone. Blindness makes one totally dependent on others, and deprives us of every satisfaction that results from light.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)