Basque to Pashto: preserving the actor when agreement changes with time
Basque agreement does not disappear when the action is unfinished
Basque can mark an actor ergatively in an imperfective sentence. Laka’s Mirenek Patxi ikusten du describes Miren seeing Patxi, with the actor overtly marked and an auxiliary reflecting the participants. The same grammar distinguishes Nik liburuak irakurri ditut from a past-auxiliary version ending in nituen. In both, the plural object participates in agreement. A Pashto translator should recover the actor and object before interpreting what those source endings imply.
The useful source information is who sees whom or who reads which books, together with the event’s temporal and aspectual interpretation. It is not an instruction that the Pashto actor must bear one matching case whenever the Basque actor is ergative. Basque auxiliary morphology can preserve participant information across tense changes that cause a different grammatical reorganisation in Pashto. Holding the event roles constant prevents a target agreement change from being misread as a change in the person performing the action.
Pashto active transitives distinguish past from non-past
The Pashto Universal Dependencies description sets out a direct-case subject with non-past active transitive verbs and an oblique-case subject in past active transitive constructions. It also describes the verb as agreeing with the subject in the former and the object in the latter. Consequently, a Basque reading report placed in the past can require more than a different time word in Pashto: the actor’s case and the participant controlling agreement can change together.
An object-agreeing Pashto verb does not turn the books into readers. The books remain the affected object of the event, while the person remains its actor. The description also notes that third-person past forms express gender agreement. For a Basque source whose nominal system does not supply a corresponding gender distinction, the target noun and its construction must provide the relevant grammatical choice. A target ending reflecting the object should not automatically be interpreted as identifying the actor’s sex or replacing the actor with another participant.
Past and perfective are separate dimensions in Pashto
Robson and Tegey’s grammatical sketch organises Pashto verbs around present and past stems crossed with imperfective and perfective formations. This directly discourages treating past as a synonym for completed. Their account discusses imperfective past uses involving habitual or ongoing actions, so an earlier reading event need not be presented as one finished reading. The source’s aspectual interpretation must survive alongside the target argument pattern.
This distinction is useful for a Basque account of someone reading the books regularly versus finishing a particular reading event. Identify the source event presentation before selecting the Pashto stem and construction. The sketch also cautions that simple semantic paraphrases do not consistently explain every perfective occurrence. Avoid therefore promising that one Basque suffix always selects one Pashto aspect. The reliable comparison keeps three questions separate: when the event belongs, how it is presented, and which participant controls agreement in the selected target construction. That preserves the reader and the books while allowing the grammar to change.
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