Bodo to Nepali: a changed noun ending can mark respect rather than a second person
Respect is not confined to the pronoun
Narzary’s Bodo paradigm separates ordinary and honorific personal reference. A respectful source pronoun is therefore a genuine clue about how the person is presented. In Nepali, however, the target reconstruction can also involve the noun itself rather than only the replacement for a pronoun.
Prasain’s morphological study illustrates केटो, keto, and केटा, keta, in a table contrasting non-honorific and honorific human nouns. His analysis limits this morphological pattern to the relevant o-ending human nouns. It is not a rule for changing every Nepali noun whenever the Bodo text conveys respect.
Do not turn one respected person into several people
A Bodo passage may refer to one person through an honorific form while remaining singular in its actual participants. Selecting a Nepali noun from an honorific paradigm should preserve that count. A changed ending is not, by itself, evidence that the source has introduced a group.
The converse also matters. Narzary’s account distinguishes genuine plural personal reference from singular reference, and provides ordinary and honorific pronoun forms. If several people are represented in the Bodo passage, the target must not collapse them into one person merely because an honorific expression can be used for a singular participant. Recover actual reference before interpreting the target form’s social contribution.
The Nepali pronoun system has more than one respectful option
Prasain’s pronoun table distinguishes तँ, tã, तिमी, timī, and तपाईं, tapāĩ, among its second-person entries. The study also records further honorific categories for its computational analysis. Those categories should not be treated as a demand to choose the grandest available form for every courteous Bodo sentence.
A source conversation between familiar participants and a formal address to a visitor may both contain respectful language without representing identical relationships. The Bodo pronoun’s ordinary-versus-honorific contrast is useful evidence, but it does not select every Nepali interpersonal distinction automatically. Preserve the relationship established by the exchange rather than interpreting the shared English gloss you as proof that all target entries are interchangeable.
Kinship can supply information absent from a Bodo pronoun
Narzary records lexically distinct Bodo family terms, including father and mother, even though the personal-pronoun system lacks a male–female contrast. Prasain likewise lists Nepali kinship terms such as दाइ, dāi, elder brother, and दिदी, didī, elder sister. Gender-neutral pronoun reference does not make those source family relationships interchangeable.
When a Bodo passage introduces an older sibling through a kinship term and later refers to that person with a neutral pronoun, retain the initial identification. Choosing a target noun solely from the later pronoun could discard information the source already supplied. At the same time, respect toward that sibling and their position in the family are separate dimensions: the source relationship identifies who the person is, while the target honorific construction determines how that person is presented. Neither dimension should erase the other.
Language references