Bhojpuri to Pashto: the final verb may agree with a different participant
A familiar final verb conceals a different agreement system
Bhojpuri and Pashto can both place a verb after its participants, but their agreement systems differ substantially. Lohar describes Bara-Parsa Bhojpuri as nominative-accusative. Roberts’s Pashto research describes a split system in which tense and aspect affect case and agreement. Preserving the Bhojpuri word order cannot therefore guarantee that the right Pashto participant controls the predicate.
For a Bhojpuri account of a completed or past transitive event, identify the actor and affected participant independently. The source actor’s agreement ending is evidence about the Bhojpuri sentence, not a template for the Pashto ending. This direction is particularly vulnerable to a sentence that looks orderly but makes its verb agree with the wrong noun.
Past transitive clauses can point agreement toward the object
Roberts contrasts a Pashto man-eating-apple example in present and past contexts. In the past transitive construction, the actor has an oblique form and the verb reflects the feminine apple. The gender of the target verbal form consequently need not identify the person who performed the action.
Bhojpuri’s own masculine-feminine distinctions should first be interpreted within the source construction. When the corresponding Pashto predicate reflects an object, importing the Bhojpuri actor’s gender into that position changes the target agreement. A feminine Pashto past ending is not automatically evidence that a Bhojpuri male actor was mistranslated as female; the agreement controller may be a different participant.
Short pronouns cannot be placed wherever Bhojpuri puts them
Lohar distinguishes Bhojpuri postpositional noun relationships from case forms attached to pronouns. Pashto has both strong pronouns and short clitic forms with their own placement requirements. Roberts lists ze versus maa for first-person singular direct and oblique forms, and te versus taa for second person. The correct form depends on the target grammatical job.
The short first-person mee and third-person yee belong to a second-position clitic system. Thus a Bhojpuri reference that occurs close to the final verb cannot simply be transferred into the same location in Pashto. First determine who is being resumed, then construct a Pashto clause that gives its short form an appropriate position. The source pronoun’s proximity to another word is not the target placement rule.
Interpret the Bhojpuri verb chain before choosing the Pashto construction
Bhojpuri expresses ability with सक saka, managing to achieve something with पा pā and progressive meaning with रह raha. It also uses जा jā in passive constructions. These distinctions need to survive translation, but none establishes the internal structure of a Pashto compound predicate merely through a matching dictionary gloss.
Roberts’s central finding is that Pashto compound predicates can show agreement involving different participants in different components. A Bhojpuri multi-part predicate should therefore be interpreted as an event before being rebuilt in Pashto. Counting source auxiliary words, or assuming every target verbal component agrees with the actor, can miss both the source meaning and the target agreement. This is why the apparent similarity of two verb-final languages does not make their predicates interchangeable.
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