Re: Perfect mood

On Thu, 29 Nov 2007, Stefano MAC:GREGOR wrote:

Someone may some day find my "seven-voices" description useful, but I
won't hold my breath.

The feature that a verb can be modified in several ways to change the roles
of the nouns about which it talks (the subject, the objects, the
prepositional objects) is in no way restricted to Semitic languages. Even
English has it, for instance there is a causative formation sit->set,
rise->raise, lie->lay, fall->fell with a vowel change in a given root which
does not work any differently from the vowel change between Hebrew
binyanim. Some languages are poor in such morphological changes to verbs and
prefer auxiliaries or prepositions, for instance English (write, write to,
be written, be written to, cause to write, write each other), other
languages have more such morphological changes to verbs, for instance
Swahili (andika, andikia, andikwa, andikiwa, andikisha, andikiana) or Hebrew
(katav, nikhtav, hikhtiv, hitkattev).

"Voice" or "genus verbi" are common terms to call this feature, and I see no
reason why the seven binyanim of Hebrew should not be taken as a special
example of voice.

--
Helmut Richter
.

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