Description
Languages of the Indo-European family (and many others) typically have two or three voices of the three: active, middle, and passive. "Mediopassive" may be used to describe a category that covers both the middle (or "medium") and the passive voice. In synchronic grammars, the mediopassive voice is often simply termed either "middle" (typical for grammars of e.g. Ancient Greek) or "passive" (typical for grammars of e. g. modern Danish).
In the oldest Indo-European languages, the distinction active/middle was the most important, while the development in later languages has generally been to replace the old distinction with (or reinterpret it as) an active/passive distinction (e.g. modern English: to tease / to be teased). The Proto-Indo-European language itself is typically reconstructed as having two voices, active and mediopassive, where the middle-voice element in the mediopassive voice was dominant. Ancient Greek also had a mediopassive in the present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses, but in the aorist and future tenses the mediopassive voice was replaced by two voices, one middle and one passive. Modern Greek and Albanian have only mediopassive in all tenses.
A number of Indo-European languages have developed a new middle or mediopassive voice. Often this derives from a periphrastic form involving the active verb combined with a reflexive pronoun. This development happened independently in the Romance languages, the Slavic languages, and the North Germanic (Scandinavian) languages. North Germanic languages, and to some extent the Slavic languages, have fused the reflexive with the verb to form a new synthetic conjugation, while in the Romance languages the reflexive mostly remains separate.
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