Bodo to Faroese: address forms, noun cases and the person inside a family phrase
Formal address is visible in more than the pronoun
Bharadwaj’s Bodo examples contrast neutral nɰŋ and formal nɰŋtʰaŋ for a single addressee. Johan Petur Dam’s Faroese tutorial likewise distinguishes informal tú from formal tygum, but its questions also change the verb. The source’s respectful intention should therefore be expressed through a coherent target construction, not by replacing the Faroese pronoun while leaving all accompanying forms untouched.
The tutorial gives Hvaðan ert tú? beside Hvaðan eru tygum? for asking where someone is from. These are useful comparison points for a Bodo question to a visitor: the formal version need not mean that several visitors are being addressed. Interpret the Bodo addressee and degree of distance together. A target question can look plural in its polite form while still asking one person about their origin.
The same Faroese noun shape can occur in different cases
Bodo differential object marking can depend on the object’s referential and discourse properties, according to Krishna Boro’s account. Faroese has a different case system, and its Language Technology Centre documentation shows that one written noun form can represent more than one case. You cannot evaluate the target solely by looking for a visible ending corresponding to the Bodo one.
The documentation illustrates kettu in both accusative and dative environments. In its examples, seeing a cat and meeting a cat select different constructions, with surrounding words helping identify the case. A Bodo sentence’s object prominence is consequently not a universal instruction to use one Faroese case. The target verb and its grammatical requirements must be considered after the source event and participants have been understood.
Universal Dependencies’ Faroese documentation similarly notes that objects can occur in accusative, dative or genitive, and that subjects are usually nominative with exceptions. A Bodo reader should not assume that every non-nominative-looking target participant has become the recipient of an action. Compare the source role with the Faroese verb construction, rather than interpreting each case name through an English paraphrase such as to someone.
The relative’s possessor is not the clause’s speaker
In Bodo aŋ-ni a.pʰa, my father, first person belongs to the possession relationship. In the cited arrival example, the father is the person who came. Faroese finite verbs inflect for person and number, so a first-person target predicate cannot be selected just because a first-person marker appears inside the Bodo kinship noun. That would turn news about the father into news about the writer.
The Faroese language-technology documentation also describes a colloquial possessive clitic -sa, illustrated with mother and mother’s. This is a separate target resource for a possession relationship, not an arrival marker. When a Bodo passage shifts from whose parent is being discussed to what that parent did, preserve the boundary between noun-phrase possession and clause-level action. The two relationships may be compactly marked in both languages, but they do not occupy interchangeable grammatical positions.
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