Bodo to Georgian: object prominence and Georgian case patterns must be interpreted separately
A nominative Georgian form is not automatically the actor
Krishna Boro’s Bodo object-marking account relates overt marking to discourse prominence, with referential and communicative factors influencing its distribution. Georgian case patterns instead interact with the target verb’s tense, aspect and construction. A marked Bodo object cannot be assigned a fixed Georgian case simply because the source makes that participant prominent. Determine the event roles before interpreting the target endings.
The Georgian treebank researchers explicitly identify subjects in nominative, ergative or dative and direct objects in nominative or dative. For a Bodo report involving two people, a Georgian nominative form can consequently belong to the affected participant rather than the actor. Treating every nominative as the person performing the action can reverse who did what even when the target words themselves have been translated correctly.
This is a documented source of difficulty in the researchers’ syntactic analysis: nominative and dative forms do not alone identify subject versus object. A Bodo reader assessing a Georgian translation should compare the complete clause, including the verb and its time–aspect construction. A change in the target noun’s ending after a change of tense need not introduce a different participant; the target grammar may organize the same participants differently.
An anticipated event must not become a completed one to fit a case pattern
Boro and Basumatary contrast Bodo -ha, about to, with -zen, just starting. The first need not entail that the event happens, while the second entails a beginning. In a Georgian translation, choosing a convenient past or completed construction for the sake of familiar case forms would be a poor trade: it can change whether the Bodo event occurred at all.
Their corpus discussion includes an imminent attempt to sit down for lunch that was interrupted. Keep that event poised before its start if the source does. The Georgian case pattern should follow a construction with the appropriate meaning, rather than forcing the source into a completed action and then fitting the participants around it. Event interpretation comes before matching grammatical labels across these two systems.
Person inside a family noun is different from person on a Georgian verb
The Georgian grammatical documentation describes verbs with subject and object person marking, including constructions with indirect objects. Bodo also carries person information in other places: Bharadwaj records aŋ-ni a.pʰa, my father, and bi-ni bi.pʰa, his or her father. Those source prefixes identify a possessor within the kinship phrase. They must not be mistaken for Georgian verbal markers naming the action’s subject or recipient.
For example, news that my father came has the father as the arriving participant; first person identifies the family relationship. If the Bodo passage then says that someone gave him something, the arrival participant and the recipient have to be linked through the actual narrative. Georgian can encode several participant relationships on its verb, but compact target morphology does not excuse transferring the wrong source person. Separate the possessor, actor and recipient even when one sentence mentions all three.
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