Re: Perfect mood

On Sat, 1 Dec 2007, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

On Dec 1, 3:24 am, "Stefano MAC:GREGOR" <esperant...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My use of the term "voice" was just an attempt to use a familiar term
to translate the Hebrew term "binyan", just as some people use the
terms "gender" and "number", rather than "class", to describe Swahili.

And vice versa. In a description of German declension I wrote a year or
two ago, I am using the term "class" instead of "combination of gender and
number" (because German has 3 genders but only 4 classes).

Swahili noun classes fit any definition of grammatical gender. Semitic
binyanim ("Forms," _stirpes_) do not fit any definition of grammatical
voice that I know of. If voice were a morphological category, then how
could you say English has a passive?

It would be more interesting to find an answer to the converse question:
when there are many languages where there are morphological changes to
verbs marking similar semantic changes as the Semitic binyanim do, what
should this grammatical feature be called? "Binyan" would be perfectly
fitting but is, as far as I know, only used in the context of Semitic
languages. The term "genus verbi" seems not to be used in English. So we
have for morphological changes to verbs only the terms "person", "number",
"gender", "tense", "aspect", "mood", and "that nameless thing we could
call binyan, were that word not restricted to Semitic languages".

--
Helmut Richter
.

Quantcast