zagle1772 — 11/25/2025, 6:27:30 PM

so one time in english our teacher was yapping about “the subject is the doër of the verb”, and then she was like “well, i’m getting some looks from the latin students, because of the passive voice, and like, you can do that in english too, like ‘the cheese was eaten by [one of my classmates’ names]’, but usually in english we want the subject to be the agent” and like

who tf is we?

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mybearworld:

you could technically argue this still holds for passive sentences, probably more so for latin than for english though because english has weird passives

like in “malum a discipulo editur”, the malum is the one doing the edi, not the discipulus

and in the same vein “the apple is eaten by the student” has the apple doing the being eaten

11/25/2025, 7:20:28 PM
zagle1772:

i suppose that's true, but at least to me, since not all verbs are transitive, and for transitive verbs, the active and passive are essentially two sides of the same coin, thinking of the apple as doing the being eaten seems somewhat unintuïtive to me also "the one doïng the verb" isn't exactly the most rigorous definition of an agent, but uh idk where i was goïng w/ this

11/26/2025, 4:10:50 AM