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Grammatical Voice

The voice of the verb describes relationship between the verb and the roles (agent or patient) of it's arguments (subject and object). Nûrlâm has two voices: Active and Passive. When reflexive pronoun -îm (self) is added to the verb as clitic it may be treated as Reflexive voice. But due to rarity of this term in majority of real-world languages, and little impact on grammar and syntax this term is not used in Nûrlâm.


Active voice

Active voice is used most frequently. In active voice the agent of action is the subject of the sentence. The verb is not specially marked for active voice.


Passive voice

In Passive voice the subject of the sentence is the patient (receiver, underdoer) of an action expressed by verb. There are 3 ways of expressing passive voice in Nûrlâm. The first one is to use the participles for present and past tenses. The subject (= patient) is not marked with case ending (Nominative case), the agent of action is put in Instrumental case and thus strictly speaking becomes an adverbial instead of object. The second one is using gerundive for future tense similarly to participles. However direct translation of gerundives back from Nûrlâm to English will be passive infinitives with tone of intention or purpose. The third is not a passive strictly speaking, but active impersonal constructions, used when agent of an action is not specified or is unknown. The patient is usually put into Dative case in such sentences. It can be rather said, that sometimes passive voice is expressed syntactically by impersonal clauses instead of special grammatical forms.


Examples

Tense Active Passive Impersonal
Past Orc killed an elf Elf was killed by an orc Elf was killed
Uruk doguzâ ash golug Golug kuzâ dogaga urukirzi Doguzâ golug
Present Orc is killing an elf Elf is being killed by an orc Elf is being killed
Uruk dogâ ash golug Golug kulâ dogag urukirzi Dogâ golug
Future Orc will kill an elf Elf will be killed by an orc Elf will be killed
Uruk dogubâ ash golug Golug (kulâ/kubâ) dogat urukirzi Dogubâ golug

See also

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