Note 799 — LECTURE VI LITERARY WORKS (continued); SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Instead of the passive the impersonal active form is ordinarily used in Anglo-Saxon; not ‘the land is called Kent,’ but, ‘one calls the land Kent.’ In the Celtic languages the so-called passive really is, in origin, an impersonal active form, which explains the (at first sight) strange phenomenon that the ‘passive’ always takes an accusative after it, see Zimmer, Keltische Studien, No. 8.