English Language & Usage Asked on May 9, 2021
I’d need help from native english people to understand if and how the verb "to give birth" can be used in a passive form.
I have this phrase but I’m not sure it’s ok.
"They pray for help from idols given birth to by frightened minds."
I’ve read somewhere on the web that the passive form must have the "to be" + "past participle" + "to".
now I miss the to be in the phrase but not sure how to use it in the right way.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT:
First of all I wanna say thanks to all of you, who have spent a little time to answer my question. So, what we have here? Well it seems to me that almost each one of you has his own view.
Even my own phrase, that I thought was wrong or incomplete, has its own "supporter", and even if it is described as non perfect, seems that the same form is quite present on the web.
Than we have some alternative form: Generated by / Birthed by / Born of.
This can be reassumed as follow:
They pray for help from idols,
which is a vast array of solution, even if I didn’t understand wich one would be the "most correct", if one of them can fall under this kind of definition.
Any other solution and/or further explanation is more than welcome.
Thanks again guys.
I’ll follow this thread as long as someone of you keep on adding his point of view.
Cheers.
No. It may not be ungrammatical, but it sounds clumsy. The multi-word verb (traditionally, phrasal verb) give birth to resists undergoing the passive transformation, even though it is transitive. This is especially true when whiz-deletion (here 'which were/are') occurs.
You're better using the past participle of a simplex (not a phrasal) verb here,
(or even
[[Merriam-Webster]((https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/birth)]:
birth [verb] [transitive verb]
1 chiefly dialectal : to bring forth
2a: to give rise to
...
To be fair, there are quite a lot of examples of 'was given birth to by ...' on the internet, but not usually in past-participle clauses (ie lacking the 'was'/'were').
Answered by Edwin Ashworth on May 9, 2021
One way of doing this is to use the verb bear for "give birth to"
- formal, literary
Give birth to (a child)‘she bore six daughters’
— Lexico
This takes the past participle born or borne.
It's slightly peculiar because for your use it needs the preposition of rather than by:
They pray for help from idols, born of frightened minds.
The reason for using of is that with by, born/borne takes its usual meaning of carried. Of changes its meaning to the "give birth" sense, as shown in MW's definition for born of necessity.
It may be better to lose the comma and have "born of frightened minds" as a postpositive adjectival phrase:
They pray for help from idols born of frightened minds.
... that is, "idols which were born of frightened minds."
Answered by Andrew Leach on May 9, 2021
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