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:
“The fourth day of Christmas,
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Four colly birds,”
—Unknown. The Twelve Days of Christmas (l. 13–15)
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—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.”
—Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1934)