Voz Media Summary

[Quaeso]

Hi, this is a little summary of a difficult grammatical idea that we spoke about in this thread. The purpose of this is not to ask a question but mostly to organize the idea in my mind, and to submit the idea for your review. Hopefully I can explain things in a way that is understandable.

So it's clear that in Greek, the Middle Voice often has its own distinct form in it's verbs. This 'Middle Voice' is called Middle because it is somewhere between Active and Passive, and is essentially reflexive. In Latin, which inherited much of it's grammar and vocabulary from Greek, there is no distinct middle verb form, but there are several special Latin verbs that have a passive form, but a reflexive meaning (eg. corpus curatur= el cuerpo se cura= the body heals itself) . This reflexive meaning seen in the Latin with the passive verb is also called by grammarians the 'Middle Voice'.


As Spanish develops, it brings this with it, but the passive forms (baked into the Latin verbs) also gradually disappear, and the Middle Voice (reflexive in meaning, and passive in form) changes into a transitive pronominal (a transitive verb with a pronoun, e.g. cuerpo se cura= "the body heals itself"). Then this transitive pronominal construction began to be thought of as an intransitive meaning ((se cura="the body heals"= "the body becomes healed", instead of "the body heals itself"), or cansarse (“to get tired”, instead of purely "to tire oneself"), cerrarse (“to close”, instead of purely "to close itself")), and then a debate began if this new intransitive meaning was acceptable, or if it should remain simply the transitive plus pronoun reflexive. [let me know if I should explain the terms transitive and intransitive]

So because of the controversy which continues today, the DLE wishes to avoid the term "Middle Voice" entirely, but uses a similar idea which is similar, but not debated, called the 'Middle Construction', which involves either a transitive pronominal with an intransitive meaning (Se secan los campos- “The fields dry up”), especially to signify a change of state, or an intransitive verb with an intransitive meaning (Crece la hierba “The grass grows”) to do the same thing, however the underlying idea of this 'middle construction' in both its transitive and intransitive forms still seems to be a reflexive connotation. - all paraphrased from the DLE online manual 41.13d-41.13h

So I have my doubts if that is understandable, but there it is.