Japanese/Old Japanese/Active-Passive alignment.md
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+Contrary to the popular beliefs, Old Japanese (and proto-japanese) had the active-passive alignment instead of the accusative-nominative aligment it (supposedly) has today.
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+# Transitivity of the verbs of change (henka dousi)
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+Most verbs of change have two variants, one being intransitive (representing an action of being changed/impacted), and one transitive (representing an act of causing something/someone to change). Here are some examples:
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+| original verb | intransitive form | transitive form | meaning |
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+| ------------- | ----------------- | --------------- | ------- |
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+| hajimu | hajimaru | hajimeru | to start |
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+| nigu | nigeru | nigasu | |
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+Having this duality might seem a bit odd, given that old-japanese had only one form for these verbs. Given old japanese tended to omit case-marking particles, it might seem odd not to know if the noun is being the subject or the object of an action
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+## The active-passive model
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+- **Agent** - the active doer of an action, someone who makes the impact
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+- **Patient** - the passive receiver of an action, someone (involuntarly) impacted by the action
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+On the surface, it might look like these are just synonyms for subject and object, however they represent _semantic_ function instead of _syntactical_ one. As an example, making a sentence use passive voice changes the subject, but it doesn't change the agent
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+The key piece of info is that **verbs of action have an obligatory agent and optional patient, while verbs of change have an obligatory patient and optional agent**.
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