Bodo to Persian: keep the possessor separate from the person doing the action
A Bodo kinship prefix can become a different Persian construction
Bharadwaj’s Bodo fieldwork records aŋ-ni a.pʰa in a sentence about my father arriving. The first-person prefix on the kinship noun identifies whose father is meant. Persian offers both possessive endings and an ezāfe construction, so retaining that relationship does not require reproducing the Bodo sequence of possessor followed by prefixed family noun. The target can restructure the phrase while keeping the arriving person and their relationship to the speaker unchanged.
The University of Texas Persian course illustrates pedar-e sārā, Sara’s father, with the family noun before the name. Its possessive lesson also explains endings attached to nouns. These resources express the owner relationship in target-specific ways. When a Bodo source explicitly names the possessor, a Persian phrase built with the name is different from an unsupported switch to my or your; the smaller target form is appropriate only if it refers to the same established person.
An ending on a noun is different from an ending on a verb
Persian can use related-looking pronominal endings for possession on nouns and for objects with verbs. The course contrasts کتابش, ketābaš, his or her book, with زدش, zadaš, a form in which the ending refers to the person or thing hit. In a Bodo account involving a relative and another participant, determine what each person marker belongs to before judging whether the Persian clause has preserved the event.
The distinction is especially useful beside Bodo bi-ni bi.pʰa, his or her father. That source prefix identifies a possessor; it does not by itself say that the possessor was hit, seen or addressed. A Persian object ending must follow the action’s actual object. A translation can retain the correct third-person value yet attach it to the wrong grammatical relationship, producing a different story about the same people.
Respectful you can look plural without introducing a group
Bodo distinguishes neutral nɰŋ from formal nɰŋtʰaŋ in the fieldwork examples. Both occur with the same second-person prefix on father. Persian similarly permits respectful address through شما, šomā, formally its plural you. The useful comparison is the addressee’s social role, not a requirement to match every source prefix with a different target suffix. A respectful Persian plural-looking pronoun can still address the single person in the Bodo message.
Persian’s third-person pronoun او can mean he or she. The cited Bodo father examples likewise gloss their third-person possessor without forcing a male–female choice. If the passage never identifies the possessor’s gender, this aspect of the Persian result need not resolve it. Distinguish the male relative named by father from the potentially female person whose father he is; those are different referents within the same family phrase.
Finally, Persian ezāfe is frequently pronounced without a visible written vowel after a consonant. A Bodo reader accustomed to overt source relationship marking should not conclude that an unmarked-looking Persian family phrase necessarily lacks its connector. Assess the target construction and its noun order together. The visible amount of morphology is not a direct measure of whether the original possessor relationship survived.
Language references