Basque to Belarusian: nor, nork and nori ask about different participants
The question word itself signals a role
Nor erori da kalean? asks who fell in the street. Nork ikusi du gizona? asks who saw the man. Laka’s Basque grammar uses these questions to illustrate a distinction that matters when translating into Belarusian: the person asked about can be the subject of falling or the agent of seeing, even though Basque marks those roles differently.
The difference between nor and nork is not a difference between an unspecified person and a named person. It follows the Basque absolutive and ergative pattern. A Belarusian question must recover the person’s role in the event, rather than assume that the extra Basque ending requires an extra participant or a different degree of politeness.
Belarusian does not recreate the Basque ergative pattern
The Belarusian Universal Dependencies description lists nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and locative cases. Its subject description identifies nominative as the ordinary subject case, with genitive in certain negative or quantified environments. There is no instruction here to preserve a separate ergative subject category simply because Basque has used nork.
For a witness asking who saw somebody, the missing information concerns the observer. The man already mentioned is the person seen. A Belarusian rendering that instead asks which man was seen reverses the gap in the question: it requests identification of the observed person and leaves the observer unasked. Both questions may sound plausible in an incident report, but they collect different evidence.
Likewise, asking who fell does not imply that somebody pushed that person. The Basque intransitive question describes the fall without adding a causer. When reconstructing the Belarusian clause, preserve that limited claim rather than introducing an agent merely to explain why the source question word lacks the ergative ending.
A recipient question is a third relationship
Basque nori introduces the dative question in Laka’s example about a man giving a book. Here the unknown participant is the recipient. The giver and the object given are already supplied. Belarusian also has a dative category, but its actual interrogative form and agreement belong to Belarusian grammar rather than to a copied Basque suffix.
Consider the practical difference between finding the giver of a missing book and finding its recipient. The first investigation asks who initiated the transfer; the second asks who received the item. Substituting a general who question without establishing the intended role can direct a reply toward the wrong stage of the transaction.
For these Basque questions, first identify what the answer must supply: the person who fell, the observer who saw somebody, or the recipient of a book. Then form the Belarusian question around that role. This preserves the request for information while allowing the target case system to express it without manufacturing an ergative equivalent.
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