Basque to Bangla: translate the person who likes something, not the case ending
A Basque dative can name the person having the experience
In a Basque recommendation or personal message, a dative expression does not necessarily identify somebody receiving an object. Goenaga’s case chapter distinguishes the experiencer in psychological predicates from a recipient, beneficiary or possessor. With gustatu, the person having the preference and the thing producing it have different grammatical roles. Translating the suffix alone as a Bangla recipient expression can therefore misrepresent a straightforward statement of liking.
The chapter’s example Amonari izugarri gustatzen zaio kafea says that grandmother likes coffee very much. Grandmother is the dative experiencer; coffee supplies the stimulus. In a message accompanying a coffee purchase, that distinction separates her preference from the quite different claim that somebody gave her coffee. The surrounding gift context does not turn this particular Basque predicate into a transfer verb.
The auxiliary carries information that Bangla must recover differently
Laka illustrates niri zu gustatzen zatzaizkit, meaning that I like you, with singular you. The corresponding plural-you example changes the auxiliary to zatzaizkidate. A reader cannot identify the experiencer by treating the most conspicuous person ending as an ordinary English-style subject ending. The Basque construction encodes more than one participant in its auxiliary, alongside the overt dative and absolutive expressions.
This matters when a short source message leaves a participant unspoken. Establish who has the preference and whom or what that preference concerns before selecting the Bangla wording. A translation about the writer liking several people must not become a statement that several people like the writer. The relevant evidence is the Basque construction and its agreement, not the apparent order of pronouns in an isolated phrase.
Bangla can express liking with a genitive experiencer
Thompson describes Bangla impersonal constructions with third-person verb forms and, frequently, a genitive experiencer. In combinations of laga with bhalô or kharap, the genitive identifies the person who likes or dislikes something. Her example amar bhalô lagche can describe feeling well; with an understood object, the same visible sequence can describe liking it. This is a contextual ambiguity, not permission to ignore the object of Basque gustatu.
For a Basque comment about a particular coffee, retain that stimulus where its omission would leave a Bangla reader interpreting the sentence as a report about wellbeing. Conversely, a Bangla genitive at the start of the translated sentence does not automatically describe ownership: its function depends on the construction. Thompson explicitly distinguishes genitive experiencers from genitives in possessive-existential sentences.
Other Basque dative predicates need their own target expression
Goenaga also groups predicates concerning remembering, regret, importance and difficulty among constructions that can introduce an experiencer. This does not make them synonyms of gustatu. A Basque account of something being difficult for the writer needs a Bangla difficulty expression, rather than the liking construction merely because both source sentences contain a dative.
The useful comparison is therefore predicate plus participants: identify the psychological relation, identify its experiencer, and preserve its stimulus or relevant action. That analysis explains why a natural Bangla version can change the experiencer’s case while keeping exactly the same personal judgement.
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