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Beside fari (to do), grammars like this one give six other forms of the infinitive in Esperanto:

          simple / progressive   / perfect      / prospective
(active)  fari     esti faranta  / esti farinta / esti faronta
(passive) ???      esti farata   / esti farita  / esti farota

But I can't find the passive equivalent to fari: is it something like esti fari?

Any help would be appreciated!

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  • I'm not sure such an inflection exists in Esperanto. Come to think of it, I'm not sure such an inflection exists in English either and I'm not sure how one would work. An English gloss of the structure you're looking for would help me.
    – acattle
    Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 0:31
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    @acattle - The English glosses, the passive infinitive, are "to be done", "to be written", "to be stopped", etc.
    – Yellow Sky
    Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 0:50
  • @YellowSky Wouldn't that be passive perfect?
    – acattle
    Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 1:50
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    @acattle - No, passive perfect would be "to have been done", "to have been written", "to have been stopped", etc. Look here.
    – Yellow Sky
    Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 2:06

2 Answers 2

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It is all very simple, there is a marvellous Esperanto middle voice derivational suffix -iĝ- which makes every root passive (at least from the point of view of an English speaker). Followed by the infinitive suffix -i (-iĝi) it forms passive infinitives:

fari - "to do/make"

fariĝi - "to be done/made"

Note, that making passives with this suffix lies in the sphere of derivation, word building, and not in the sphere of conjugation, that can be the reason you haven't at once remembered about it as a passive suffix.

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  • 1
    A very interesting answer : thank you very much.
    – suizokukan
    Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 10:06
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Any Esperanto adjectival root can be turned into a verb of state by simply adding the verbal endings. This gives rise to another class of passive infinitives derived from passive participles:

Passive Participle    Derived Infinitive    Meaning
------------------    ------------------    -------
farita                fariti                to have been done
farata                farati                to be in the process or state of being done
farota                faroti                to be done sometime in the future

Because passive participial suffixes are unavoidably temporal, you can't create intemporal passive infinitives this way (for that, use fariĝi suggested above).

As an aside, you can, of course, do the same thing with active participles to create a series of temporal active infinitives:

Active Participle     Derived Infinitive    Meaning
-----------------     ------------------    -------
farinta               farinti               to have done
faranta               faranti               to be doing
faronta               faronti               to be about to do, to be going to do

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