Wednesday 24 October 2012

Passive revisited

Now to clear up the passive voice in Kareyku. The passive uses the impersonal suffix -ey, but adds onto it the corresponding transition which, therefore, will have a passive meaning. This is the more idiomatic way of conveying a reversal of the normal flow of the transition, some examples:

awi chaqqeytas, "the field is plowed"

To which we can add;

awi odanqa chaqqeytas, "the field is plowed by you"

kukun taroqa weneytanchi, "a bird was bought by my father", "my father bought a bird", lit. "acquired"

Talking about this being a more idiomatic way to reverse the natural flow of transitions, I give you these examples (remember Kareyku very often leaves pronouns out, specially in conversations):

qorikas, qoreykas?, "I care for you, do you care for me?" lit. "am I cared (by you)?"

This absence of pronouns will depend on context, since Kareyku is context-dependent. However, they are marked when they are needed or when you want to indicate an action was done for someone else, let's see an example of this last situation:

waka taroqa yaran weneytansi, "my father got me a wife"

By this last sentence I don't mean, as in the previous example, that the wife was "bought" but was rather "acquired" as in an arranged marriage. This, by the way, was a very common practice of some Kareyku speakers.

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