Arabic subjects and Pashto past-transitive participants
A source first-person actor may change target pronoun form
Arabic أنا can identify a first-person subject in present and past accounts. Pashto strong pronouns have construction-dependent forms, including direct “زه” and oblique “ما”. Their distribution cannot be selected by treating every source subject as the same target grammatical case.
This matters when an Arabic account shifts from a present action to a past action affecting an object. Relevant Pashto past transitive constructions organise case and agreement differently. The target form representing the actor can change even though the Arabic speaker remains the same individual.
Identify the event’s actor, affected object and time before choosing the target pronoun. A changed case form is not a change of person, and a matching pronoun identity does not make every surrounding predicate grammatical. The target participant expression and verb must belong to the same construction.
The object can control agreement in a past event
Pashto has ergative patterns in relevant past constructions, with an oblique actor and agreement controlled by the affected object. Arabic subject agreement does not map mechanically onto that organisation. A target feminine ending can concern a feminine object rather than a female actor.
For a source report about a man seeing a woman, preserve the man as viewer and the woman as the person seen. Do not exchange their roles merely to make the target ending appear to agree with the Arabic subject. The target case and agreement are another grammatical way to express the same event.
Compound predicates and aspect complicate a blanket description of all past forms. The research consulted distinguishes several interactions, so the practical rule is to inspect the selected target construction. It would be inaccurate to claim that every Pashto past word always follows one simple object-agreement pattern without qualifications.
An addressed listener can occupy different roles
The Pashto direct and oblique second-person forms “ته” and “تا” illustrate another case contrast. Arabic second-person forms distinguish gender and number, but those source categories do not decide the target case by themselves. A listener can be an actor, an affected participant or the complement of another relation.
An Arabic question asking what the listener did and a report describing what somebody did to the listener consequently need separate target analysis. The fact that both address the same person does not guarantee the same Pashto form. Check the role inside each clause rather than choose one target word for you throughout the conversation.
The examples are strong pronouns used to expose the contrast. Pashto also uses shorter pronominal clitics, so an independent emphatic pronoun is not required at every point where Arabic expresses participant information through attached morphology.
A final verb is not produced by reversing Arabic words
Pashto commonly has verb-final clause organisation, while Standard Arabic permits different subject–verb arrangements, including verb-initial clauses. Moving the Arabic first word to the end cannot establish the target participant structure described above.
Build the predicate for the same event, then check case and agreement. Target nouns have their own gender, number and inflection, which need not match the Arabic lexical equivalent. The source’s grammatical categories help interpret its sentence; they do not supply a ready-made suffix sequence for Pashto. Preserving who acted and who was affected is the test that connects those separate grammatical systems.
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