Bodo to Marathi: an actual beginning, an imminent plan and a prediction are different claims
Keep the action’s beginning at the right point
Boro and Basumatary distinguish Bodo -zen, just starting, from -ha, about to. The first entails that the event starts; the second does not necessarily entail that it occurs. Marathi also offers different ways to describe a beginning or a prospect. The University of Chicago course’s account of लाग- distinguishes an action beginning from one that someone is going to begin. Translate the stage reached by the source event, not just its activity root.
The course gives पाऊस पडायला लागला for rain beginning to fall. This is useful beside a Bodo actual-beginning report: the rain has started, rather than merely threatening to start. By contrast, the Bodo chapter’s interrupted lunch example concerns people about to sit down who do not do so in that context. Rendering that source as an actual beginning would erase the interruption’s importance.
A source suffix can be short while contributing the central news of the sentence. If the Bodo message is about a task just getting underway, do not let a Marathi future expression postpone it. If the source is only anticipatory, do not let a Marathi phase verb assert a beginning. The distinction affects what the recipient believes has happened, even when the same task appears in every version.
A Marathi prospective is not simply every future reference
The Chicago course distinguishes the -णार prospective from a more neutral future tense. It describes the prospective as presenting an action felt as imminent or definite. That gives a helpful comparison with Bodo anticipation, but not a fixed equivalence: determine how close or established the source prospect is, and whether it refers to a plan, expectation or an action on the verge of starting.
The course also notes that the prospective auxiliary may be omitted when understood. A shorter Marathi result is therefore not necessarily missing a source contribution. Conversely, the presence of an auxiliary is not proof that the target preserves the Bodo event stage. Compare the prospective meaning and the participant identified by the construction, rather than using the number of written words as a measure of completeness.
Marathi agreement needs the right participant, not a copied source person value
Bharadwaj’s Bodo fieldwork records aŋ-ni a.pʰa, my father, in an arrival example. The first-person prefix belongs to the kinship relationship, while the father is the arriving participant. Marathi finite morphology can mark person and number, and its agreement also interacts with construction and gender. A source possessive prefix does not instruct the translator to make the Marathi predicate first person.
The Marathi grammatical documentation notes gender and number distinctions across nouns and agreeing forms. In a Bodo report about a relative beginning an action, preserve the relative’s identity separately from the writer’s role as possessor. The target may need agreement information in a place where the source packages information differently. Do not infer the moving participant from my, your or his inside the family phrase; establish who begins the action from the whole Bodo clause before judging the Marathi form.
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