Basque to Sinhala: a person who falls need not become an object of somebody else’s action
Basque nor can ask about the person undergoing a fall
Nor erori da kalean? asks who fell in the street in Laka’s Basque grammar. The unknown person is the single participant in the falling event. A Sinhala translation should preserve that situation rather than introduce somebody who pushes or drops the person merely because a target case form differs from the Basque one.
Laka contrasts this with nork in a question about who saw a man. Basque distinguishes the participant in falling from the agent-like argument of a transitive clause through case. That grammatical contrast does not require every Sinhala equivalent to assign the same visible case to the corresponding person.
Spoken Sinhala can mark an involuntary fall with an accusative person
Carmen Jany’s study illustrates maawə wæṭe-nəwa for a first-person involuntary fall. The person marked accusative is still the one falling. The example is a documented spoken-Sinhala illustration, not a complete translation of the Basque street question. It shows why an accusative-looking participant need not imply an unmentioned transitive actor.
Jany explains that the case of a single argument can reflect whether the person is an affected undergoer or an experiencer, alongside the relevant verb form. Her discussion specifically links the falling example to lack of control. Translating its structure as someone causing me to fall would add a participant and a causal claim that the example itself does not contain.
For a Basque account of an accident, preserve whether the source merely reports the fall or separately identifies somebody responsible. A target grammatical pattern associated with an affected person is not evidence of an assailant. Conversely, if the source does state that somebody pushed the person, that additional action must not disappear into a simple falling description.
Avoid using one case label as a complete interpretation
Jany cautions that the relationship between volitive or involitive forms and control is not complete. Her analysis concerns a spoken variety and documents several semantic and lexical factors in case marking. It would be inaccurate to turn the falling illustration into a universal rule that every Sinhala accusative person describes an accident.
The Basque question also leaves other information open. Asking who fell does not state why the fall happened, whether an injury resulted or whether the speaker witnessed it. The Sinhala version should request the same missing identity without filling those gaps through an overly specific verb choice or an invented account of responsibility.
For Basque into Sinhala, identify the event and the participant’s role before interpreting case morphology. In the street question, retain the person as the one who falls, and preserve any separately expressed cause only when it is present. This allows the target construction to mark affectedness appropriately without turning an intransitive incident into a different event with an added actor.
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