S(orry if bad english, I'm only certified A1.2)

Hello guys and not guys here. The last few weeks I started to redo my main conlang, which is called "Malossiano" more or less from scratch, by making its protolang, I pretty much have a basic drawer of how it is, but I came with a problem: the protolang is SOV while Malossiano is supposed to be OSV, I didn't know how to adress that, until I saw in a video a part of how to construct passive voice in that protolang, passive voice normally swap subject and object of the base oration like the next example in english:

Dog eats chicken. Dog is subject (does the action), chicken is the object (receives an action).

In passive voice:

Chicken is eaten by dog. The chicken is now the subject sintactically, but still receiving the action, viceversa for dog.

Then, I thought that passive voice pretty much turns English SVO word order to OVS in passive voice (ignoring the verb tensing part), and so could mean that for my SOV (Dog chickens eats) it would turn the word order to OSV (Chickens by Dog is eaten). The grammar/syntaxis is obviously different between that proto and english, just using english grammar because the post is focused in my question and should have been sleeping by now.

Is kt possible that the passive wors order then becomes the baseorder of the language?, I know that would means assimilation of the passive markers and other things, but its that possible?

  • Chicken is eaten by dog. The chicken is now the subject sintactically, but still receiving the action, viceversa for dog.

    Then, I thought that passive voice pretty much turns English SVO word order to OVS in passive voice (ignoring the verb tensing part)

    Not really. The key here is that is that what is the subject and what the object isn't related on the meaning, but on how does each element interact syntactically with the verb.

    Note that, in English, the word order of active and passive sentences is exactly the same: always SVO.

    That being said, if your language used different word orders for passive and active sentences, and the sentences had any other clue to know if they are active or passive (i.e. verb conjugation, something working as "by" in English, etc.), it seems easy that eventually it came to use a single word order, either the sentences are actives or passives.

    parent
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    Thanks for the source, but I think you didn't understand my question

    parent root

    From the constructions given in WALS, unless the passive is marked somehow, word order will be ambiguous.

    For example:

    "Dog meat eat" could be SOV or OSV.

    Is dog eating the meat or the meat eating the dog?

    Though, say a language has strict SOV word order but no passive marking, switching the order of the nouns could be one construction.

    So

    Dog meat eat. →"The dog eats the meat."

    Meat dog eat. → "The meat is eaten by the dog."

    is possible, but attested in no language, which may be because of its ambiguity.

    parent root

    There language that word position is not determining factor of thematic role, changing in word orders just changing topic of sentence around and then thematic role is determined by Animacy of noun. Noun with higher Animacy noun take agent role while lower Animacy noun take patient role. And to inverse this, inverse marking is marked on verb to told that higher Animacy noun take patient role and vice versa.

    So simply swapping position of noun as above glossing is effectively make active sentence becomes passive sentences by swapping topics of sentence.

    This kind of semantic alignment called Direct-Inverse alignment. But note that what considering to have higher Animacy is varied by language.

    parent root