DEPONENT VERBS

When I did Latin O level, I learned about deponent verbs. These have a passive form (as in "I am eaten"), but an active meaning (I eat).

A classical curiosity? Well, not quite. Rather oddly, Danish has a fair number of them, and in common use. The Danish verbs for think, meet, long for, fight, share, succeed, and even speak (as in "we'll speak later") are all in the passive form. It's odd, and not just because I have difficulty with the concept of passive thinking. The roots of Danish grammar are Germanic rather than Latinate, and I can't think (passively) of any deponent verbs in German.

All of which supports my theory that every language is hard, but each in its own peculiar way. Latin nouns had six cases, but that's nothing compared with Finnish's fifteen (English has next to none). Swahili has no irregular verbs, but it has hardly any prepositions, retains a subjunctive, and has six different noun classes that inflect in the plural at the beginning of the word rather than the end. I can't imagine how a foreigner gets to grips with character and tonal languages like Chinese. A hobby for my old age, perhaps.

Walter Blotscher