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

able to explain why it is „thy‟ and not „thou‟, or why, later on in the Lord‟s Prayer, „thine‟
replaces „thou‟ in the line: “For thine is the Kingdom”.
This constitutes, therefore, a passive competence distanced clearly from active
competence, to the extent that the sentences are intelligible, but only with severe limitations;
most listeners would probably group together „thee‟, „thou‟, „thine‟ and „thy‟ into a general
lexical group meaning „you‟ or „your‟, depending on the context. 576 One can imagine a
similar situation in Latin, whereby listeners might associate passively, for example, any verbs
with –ns – or – nt – at the end to be a present participle, regardless of whether they could
decline correctly the endings themselves, or else only use the relative pronoun „quod‟ within
their own speech (> Sp. que), but passively recognise all of its declensions in Latin.
In this respect, Walsh (1991), in a volume edited by Wright, highlighted the difficulty
of Wright‟s position in this respect: “I suspect, perhaps out of a desire to take a position
diametrically opposed to the traditional one [Wright] pushed the point a little too far, at times
even ignoring the thrust of his own evidence” (ibid.: 205). Indeed, the very fact that the Latin
passive and deponent verbs are not really discussed by Wright does seem strange given his
typically clear and informed arguments.
Some scholars, however, have attempted to study the passive and deponent synthetic
forms within the context of the Wright thesis. Green (1991), for example, took a pro-Wright
576 Thou is actually the nominative form, whilst thee is accusative. Thy and thine are the attributive
and predicative genitive forms respectively.
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