Amharic to Northern Kurdish: past actions change how participants are marked
The doer of a past action may use an oblique form
Amharic verb forms carry participant information through their own agreement and pronoun systems. Northern Kurdish, or Kurmanji, has a different alignment pattern in past transitive constructions: the agent is oblique, the patient is direct, and the verb can agree with the patient. A pronoun that looks unlike the ordinary target subject is therefore not automatically a mistranslated doer.
The reference grammar illustrates min ew dît, I saw him, alongside wî ez dîtim, he saw me. These short examples show how the same event type changes its participant marking when the people exchange roles. For an Amharic report about a completed encounter, first identify who saw whom. Then check the Kurdish construction as a whole. Searching for an ordinary direct-case equivalent of every source subject would misread the target past pattern and could reverse the interpretation of the encounter.
Possessive endings are not all owner pronouns
Amharic attaches person-related possessive information to a noun. Kurmanji uses an ezafe or construct relationship on the possessed expression, linking it to a following possessor or modifier. The element attached to the noun therefore does not simply identify the same owner as an Amharic possessive suffix. It belongs to a different construction that must be interpreted with what follows.
An Amharic phrase meaning a person’s book requires the owner-book relationship to remain intact, even if the target uses a linking ending and a separate owner expression. Do not treat the linker as an added object or discard it because the possessor already appears elsewhere. Distinguish the noun’s own gender and number from the owner’s identity. This is especially useful in a source list containing somebody’s several possessions: the number of items and the person who owns them are independent pieces of information.
Use the Northern Kurdish standard requested by the target
Amharic source text does not select between Kurdish varieties merely by being written in Ethiopic script. For this direction, the target is Northern Kurdish, commonly called Kurmanji. Central Kurdish or Sorani vocabulary and grammatical forms are not interchangeable with it through a change of alphabet. A related-language dictionary match is insufficient evidence that the requested target form is correct.
Preserve the Latin-script distinctions used in the Kurmanji output, including letters with marks. They belong to ordinary spelling, not an optional pronunciation guide for an Amharic reader. A target name or verb can become harder to identify after those marks are removed. When checking a past sentence, keep the complete pronoun-verb combination rather than separating it into isolated lookup items; the grammatical relationship discussed above depends on the construction. If a source quotation names another Kurdish variety, retain that reference as part of the meaning rather than silently changing the entire translation’s target.
Language references