Bangla to Russian: an object ending can depend on animacy, while a past verb depends on gender
Objects do not all take the same visible ending
The Bangla course by Dimock, Bhattacharji, and Chatterjee presents personal and noun forms through their grammatical roles. Russian introduces an additional distinction that affects some direct-object forms: grammatical animacy. Cornell’s Beginning Russian grammar explains that masculine consonant-stem singular objects use a genitive-shaped form when animate and a nominative-shaped form when inanimate.
Compare Я вижу брата, I see a brother, with Я вижу стол, I see a table. The verb still has a direct object in both cases. The absence of a new visible ending on стол does not make it a subject. A Bangla translation must identify the Russian noun class and role together, rather than treating one object ending as a universal equivalent of source object marking.
Grammatical animacy is not simply a judgment about being alive
Cornell notes less obvious animate classifications, including chess pieces, and extends the accusative distinction to plural nouns across declensions. A list of Bangla objects can therefore require different Russian forms even when each item occupies the same syntactic position.
This is distinct from the Bangla counting distinction illustrated in the source course between human classifiers and general counting expressions. A source classifier choice does not provide a complete Russian animacy classification. In particular, the target’s grammatical treatment of a named object cannot be derived solely from whether Bangla counts it with a human expression. The Russian category and the number of the noun both matter.
First-person past does not identify the speaker’s Russian agreement
The University of Texas analyzes Bangla verbs into root, aspect, tense, and person. Its kha-cch-il-am illustration means I was eating, with first-person information inside the verb. Russian past forms instead agree in gender and number with their subject, as Cornell’s past-tense lesson explains.
Thus я писал and я писала both describe I wrote or was writing, with masculine and feminine speaker agreement respectively. The Bangla first-person ending does not choose between those forms. An explicit আমি clarifies who is speaking but does not automatically add the gender information required for the Russian singular past form.
The present stem cannot always be guessed from the past spelling
Cornell’s regular-and-irregular-verbs lesson explains that producing a verb’s paradigm requires both a past stem and a non-past stem, together with its stress pattern. Its writing example contrasts the past писал with non-past forms built on пиш-. A translator cannot create a complete Russian sentence by keeping one unchanging root and swapping a Bangla-like person suffix.
This matters when a Bangla account shifts from a past action to what someone does now. The source’s shared lexical activity should remain recognizable in meaning, but the Russian spelling can change inside the stem as well as at its end. Such a change is not necessarily a new verb or a different participant. It belongs to the target conjugation, independently of the object’s animacy and the past subject’s gender.
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