Belarusian to Sinhala: a person experiencing something need not be an agent
Hunger is a condition rather than an action
Belarusian cases help connect a person to what is said about them. Sinhala also uses case, but a familiar case name does not guarantee the same role in every target construction. In particular, a person experiencing a condition can be marked differently from a prototypical actor performing an action.
Christian Jany’s study gives maṭə badəgini-yi, I am hungry, with the person in the dative. The same paper contrasts bodily conditions with inherent-property descriptions. For a Belarusian message describing how someone feels, select the Sinhala expression as a whole rather than forcing the person into the form used in a different kind of description.
This is useful for everyday travel and family exchanges. A source stating that a person feels cold or hungry does not describe them as intentionally causing a condition. The target needs to preserve the experience, not merely combine a translated adjective with an ordinary actor form.
Having money is not doing something to money
The study illustrates maṭə salli tiye-nəwa, I have money. The possessor is dative-marked while the possessed item participates in an existence construction. A Belarusian statement about what someone has can therefore require a target structure that looks unlike a simple person-plus-action sequence.
Identify the owner separately from the available item. If a Belarusian message asks whether somebody has enough money for a journey, the translation should not turn possession into an action such as obtaining or giving. Keep the quantity and the purpose with the statement so the target construction is evaluated in the intended situation.
This also distinguishes owning something from locating it. A message about money being in a bag and a message about a person having money may mention the same object, but they provide different information. Do not accept the shared noun as evidence that the Sinhala predicate preserves the Belarusian relationship.
Liking and remembering have their own patterns
Jany’s analysis shows that even experience-related predicates need not mark participants identically. Liking and remembering distribute case differently in the examples discussed. There is no safe rule that every person connected with a feeling or thought should receive one universal Sinhala case.
When reviewing a Belarusian-to-Sinhala personal message, identify both the experiencer and what is liked or remembered. Then inspect the actual target predicate. Changing the verb while retaining the previous participant forms can leave a phrase patterned on a different expression.
The paper concerns spoken Sinhala and carefully relates case to several factors, including lexical properties. Its examples are useful guides to particular constructions, not a license to derive an entire paradigm from one familiar sentence. Treat a saved expression as evidence for that expression and its context.
Review the state being communicated
Belarusian nominal clauses can omit a visible linking verb, and Sinhala has several ways of expressing descriptions and states. Do not insert or delete a target word only to make the two texts contain matching numbers of verbs. Check what the complete predicate asserts.
For this language direction, a final reading asks whether the person acts, experiences a condition, owns an item or remembers something. Preserving that relationship gives a more useful translation than assigning the same Sinhala form to every Belarusian noun that looks like the sentence’s central participant.
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