Assamese to Maithili: when respect for more than one person reaches the verb
Shared honorific distinctions do not mean matching verb endings
Assamese and Maithili both express social distinctions in personal reference and agreement. Assamese research describes three second-person honorific tiers and number-neutral honorific verbal agreement. That is useful information about the source relationship, but it does not supply a Maithili ending by direct substitution.
Maithili has a complex agreement system in which more than one participant can matter. In a message about an elder arriving, identify whether the elder is the subject, whether the recipient is also mentioned, and whether the sentence addresses someone of a particular relationship to the writer. An Assamese form selected for respect towards the subject does not necessarily cover every distinction expressed in the Maithili target. Keep the original event and participants fixed while rebuilding the agreement. A longer target ending is not evidence that the translation has invented another action or another person.
Your father involves both a father and a possessor
The research example tohar bāp aelthun means your father came, with a mid-honorific possessor and an honorific father. The form of the verb reflects more than the arrival alone. For an Assamese source mentioning someone’s father, the relationship between the recipient and that father can matter alongside the respect accorded to the father himself.
Do not flatten that sentence into a generic respectful statement with all personal relationships removed. Equally, do not upgrade the possessor’s relationship merely because the parent is respected. The separate example ham torā beṭā-ke dekhaliau means I saw your son and illustrates another combination of speaker, possessed relative and possessor. These forms are illustrations from documented paradigms, not reusable endings for every family message. A change from your father to my father changes the reference that must be reconstructed, even if the Assamese source retains the same courteous tone.
The person listening may differ from the person in the event
Primary research on the Darbhanga variety describes restrictions on how subject, object and honorific information combine. Other research examines agreement oriented towards the speech addressee, who need not be the person acted on. Those findings make a practical distinction important: the person receiving a message can be grammatically relevant even when the message describes someone else.
If an Assamese writer tells a teacher that a student has arrived, the teacher is the listener and the student is the arriving participant. Do not make the teacher arrive simply to account for a respectful Maithili form. Conversely, a target ending must not be chosen from the student’s identity while ignoring a construction whose agreement involves the listener. The research explicitly distinguishes local varieties and their agreement restrictions. Keep the intended Maithili variety consistent rather than combining a pronoun from one documented paradigm with an ending from another. That matters most in short updates, where a small ending can carry a relationship that Assamese expressed elsewhere.
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