3. Passive Voice

The Passive is not a common old feature of the IE III dialects; it is nevertheless necessary to develop a common modern European grammatical feature based on old endings, like the Conditional.

The -r ending was usual in the Middle Voice, and it either had a special impersonal value or marked the Middle voice. There are thus two features to distinguish their uses: the form and the meaning.

a. The -r after the stem has usually in Europaio an impersonal value, and can be lengthened: -ro, -roi, -renti, -ronti, -rontoi, etc. They are used in the 3. person singular and plural, and the -nt- is added when needed to distinguish the plural; and when the Middle was needed, an -o was added. The primary -i was also added with this aim.

b. The -r after the ending was usual in forms related to the Middle Voice in Latin, Italic, Celtic, Tocharian (and even Germanic, Indo-Iranian and Anatolian). Especially in some European dialects, they replaced the primary Middle endings, and acquired a Middle-Passive value. There was, however, no opposition primary/secondary. In our Europaio system, we have chosen to assign this especially European (Northern) value to these endings, leaving the general forms in -i for the middle.

Note. The older meaning traceable (possibly that of IE II) of these endings are the same, though: impersonal subject or, at least, subject separated from the action.

This scheme can be further subdivided in the thematic and athematic paradigms:

The passives formed with these endings are only the dynamic ones, though, not the statives, which are formed with the verb es, to be. See § 7.1.3. for more information on dynamic passives.