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The Passive in English (2011)

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

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Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#61

Post by Veen »

pjc50 wrote: post #54
tkgally wrote: post #2

I enjoyed this rant at the end of the article: “[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these author…

The lesson in "Politics and the English language" is about the use of the passive voice to obscure responsibility. The canonical example from current discourse is "officer-involved shooting"; incidents involving police often engage in strange linguistic contortions to avoid assigning responsibility to the obvious person. https://fair.org/home/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police...

But it does say "Never use the passive where you can use the active." That advice is harmful to clear and elegant writing. The passive really has nothing to do with politics and police and misleading people. It's a just a structuring device that can be abused in the same way as any aspect of language. It's just as easy to obscure responsibility in the active and attribute responsibility in the passive.

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#62

Post by [deleted] »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #7
msla wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really points up the difference between linguists, who understand language, and grammarians, who merely peeve about it.

Absolutely. The grammarians George Orwell and E.B. White are infamous for doing nothing with language except complaining about it.

[deleted]

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#63

Post by Veen »

tshaddox wrote: post #15
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #4

I felt the essay was undercut by overcomplicated and repetitive explanation. The passive voice is pretty easily identified.

Yeah, I was confused. The author explicitly sets up how complicated and deeply technical the true meaning of passive is, so I was prepared for some juicy learnings, then they just…repeat the simple definition that I learned in school when I was 12.

It's not really deeply technical, it's just trying to be comprehensive and concise. If you want deeply technical, read Pullum's explanation of passives in Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#65

Post by Mlller »

pm3003 wrote: post #36
mrkeen wrote: post #30

In Latin, deponent verbs are verbs which are written in the passive form but have an active meaning. The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. But it got me thinking, it must all be relative. Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), b…

I speak French and studied Latin. We have so many language oddities (and of course 'exceptions confirm the rule') that we're not so quick to judge English. The case of 'naître' is interesting. Naître is mostly used in the past (I/he was born). The direct translation is also in French its common past form 'Je suis né', which would also be the same as a passive voice, though in the present ('I am born' but the meaning…

“Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?”

Both “bist geboren” and “wurdest geboren” are in wide-spread use, some German speakers prefer the one, some the other variant – e.g. https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThrea... – but not under all circumstances:

- “wurdest geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “werden” is called “Vorgangspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing an event’.

- “bist geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “sein” is called “Zustandspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing a state’.

A minimal pair:

- “Die Tür wird geöffnet” = ‘The door is opened’.

- “Die Tür ist geöffnet” ≈ ‘The door (has been opened and) is open’ (There is also “Die Tür ist offen” = ‘The door is open’).

So “wurdest geboren” and “bist geboren” offer two different perspectives (with a difference that often doesnʼt really matter):

- “Wann wurdest du geboren?” focuses on the past event of having been born at a certain time.

- “Wann bist du geboren?” focuses on the personʼs property to be now a person that was born at a certain time (a property, in the end, like age or weight maybe).

So the latter is rather not used for dead persons: “Kant wurde 1724 geboren” is much preferred over “Kant ist 1724 geboren”.

(If students of the German language donʼt want to memorize much here, they can, as often with German, happily apply the postmodern motto “anything goes”, plus there is probably some dialect anyway in which the form you use is the right one since the middle ages :-)

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