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:
“For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you.”
—Bible: Hebrew Deuteronomy, 6:15.
The words are also found in Exodus 20:5, referring to the second commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image ... for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”
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—Chinese proverb.
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—J.G. (James Graham)