The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

6.11 The Relationship between Synthetic Passive and Deponent Verbs
If the disappearance of the Latin synthetic passive can be illuminated by comparison
to similar processes in other languages, what of the deponent verbs? Deponent verbs were, of
course, synthetic, but functioned along the same basis as normal active verbs and so there
seems less reason for them to disappear. Indeed, many languages possess different synthetic
verbal conjugations and some have still retained a deponent verb system. The different
endings in the first person singular Polish verbs kocham, „I love‟ and kupię, „I buy‟, for
example, seem no more difficult for a learner than amo and mercor, whilst to this day
deponent verbs are found in languages such as Danish and Swedish, which have historically
been subject to loss of synthesis (Hird, Huss & Hartman 1980: 110; Allen, Holmes &
Lundskær-Nielsen 2000: 100). Interestingly, however, those Germanic languages that have
retained deponent verbs have also retained a synthetic passive (Laanamets 2004). Likewise,
Irish Gaelic was witness to a substantial diachronic preference towards analysis, including the
loss of most of its synthetic passive apart from the third-person singular. This loss has been
dated to around the ninth- and tenth-centuries, which was also when Old Irish deponent verbs
began to disappear from use (Strachan 1893).
It is therefore proposed that the disappearance of the deponent verbs was linked to the
loss of the passive. This is not because of any kind of grammatical relationship that might
have existed in the minds of Latin speakers, but rather because of the loss of an analogical
relationship. Deponent verbs had existed as what might be termed a grammatical isolate, a
feature that had always been present in Latin but that had existed as a minority form and one
that was anyway prone to alternation with normal active forms. The loss of the synthetic
passive, which mirrored and hence served to reinforce the deponent conjugation, was a fatal
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