Someone 'took his' (was) 'birth' (born)

In the BBC television comedy series Mind Your Language, Barry Evans, who plays Jeremy Brown, a teacher of an English evening class for foreign students, asks the learners to 'take your [their] seats' one day and some of the students, probably not all, hold up high the chairs they stand behind, instead of being seated. To take someone's seat does not mean holding a chair or a bench, or even the floor of a house, it simply menas to be seated, but to the minds accustomed to English expressions and phrases. Every language has its own rule, or misrule, of expressions.

The verb 'take' was twice used in an unusual collocation, which could be spotted before the copy went to production. Much before a reporter did this, an editor wrote that 'someone took his birth in 1940.' That was a literal translation of the Bangla phrase for 'someone was born in 1940.' Although birth and death, and also marriage, are believed to be ordained, independent of the agents of the acts, in Bangla, birth is an action with transitivity done by the agent and not by God --- janma grahan kara. But such expressions signifying transitivity of mother or intransitivity of the action are also possible --- janma deoya or janma haoya. The editor and the reporter, for the moment, forgot the rules or misrules of the English language.