Let us consider a culture where certain kinds of tools are in some use, but their inner workings are not well understood by most who use them. We may have locks, butter churns, fire stones, compasses, lenses and other similar things belonging to this category.
Now, it'd be somewhat easy to ascribe some manner of agency to such tools, and this could easily be reflected in verbs pertaining to their use. I.e. a lock being locked might be formed by a reflexive verb with the lock as its subject, rather than a transitive verb where the person who locks it is the subject. Maybe all verbs pertaining to these are reflexive, take direct objects as obliques and the user of them as dative.
No comments:
Post a Comment