I understand from my online research that the passive voice isn't very common in Chinese, and when it is used, there are definite constructs available to express it.
This post is to talk about a couple of examples I've come across where the same verb seems to be used in both the active and passive senses.
One of these examples is a word we've seen before, 叫 jiào ("to call"), which seems to be used in exactly the same form, in both the active and passive senses.
1. 请 在 这里 等。我 叫 他. qǐng zài zhèlǐ děng. Wǒ jiào tā. ("Please wait here. I('ll) call him.")
2. 我叫张明 wǒ jiào zhāng míng. ("I'm called Zhang Ming")
The verb is exactly the same (叫 jiào), but in the first sentence, the active voice is implied ("to call"), while in the second, the passive voice is implied ("to be called").
Another example is the word 可爱 kě ài, which means "cute".
If we break the word apart into its constituent characters, we see that 可 kě means "can" and 爱 ài means "love".
But if 可爱 kě ài means "cute", the literal meaning is probably "lovable" or "can be loved", not "can love".
So once again, a verb is used in an implied passive sense without any indication that the voice is passive.
I'm a bit confused, so I'm parking this in my "to revisit later" basket.
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