Bodo to Sindhi: attached person markers can identify an owner, an object or a recipient
A family prefix in Bodo need not become a separate Sindhi pronoun
Bharadwaj’s Kokrajhar Bodo fieldwork gives aŋ-ni a.pʰa for my father and bi-ni bi.pʰa for his or her father. The kinship noun can carry a person prefix identifying the possessor. The Sindhi Language Authority’s virtual-library grammar describes pronominal affixes on nouns as another way to express possession. A compact Sindhi family expression is therefore not automatically missing the owner named in the Bodo phrase.
The historical Sindhi chapter lists father and mother forms with attached possessors, and explains that attaching a pronoun may alter the noun’s ending. These are historical descriptive examples rather than a prescription for every modern regional form, but they show why the target cannot be checked by looking only for an unchanged dictionary noun beside a separate pronoun. The possession relationship may be present inside the target word.
Bodo’s neutral and formal second-person pronouns share the same possessor prefix on father in Bharadwaj’s examples. Respect and ownership are consequently separate source facts. A Sindhi phrase must retain whose father is discussed without treating a formal Bodo pronoun as proof that the relative himself has changed. The addressee’s social role and the relative’s identity need their own interpretation.
A person attached to a verb can have a different role
The Sindhi grammar also describes affixes attached to verbs, illustrating recipients, objects and other relationships. Its example about giving ten rupees identifies the recipient through attached person information. That is not the same function as a possessor affix on a family noun. When Bodo reports a relative giving something to another person, the Sindhi target must keep owner, giver and recipient distinct.
This makes a useful comparison with Bodo bi-ni bi.pʰa: third person inside the phrase identifies whose father is meant, not who receives a gift. Copying that person value into a Sindhi recipient position can produce a sentence about the wrong transfer. The participants may all be present somewhere in the source, but their grammatical relationships determine which attached target forms are appropriate.
A full pronoun can make distinctions an affix does not
The historical Sindhi chapter states that its listed pronominal affixes do not change for gender or distinguish the proximal and remote third-person demonstratives. The Authority’s modern teaching page, however, distinguishes masculine هِي / هُو from feminine هِيءَ / هُوءَ in independent reference. A target affix without those distinctions should not be evaluated as though it were a complete independent pronoun.
The Bodo fieldwork glosses the third-person father possessor as his or her. If the source context does identify that possessor as a particular woman or man, retain the referent through the Sindhi passage even when an attached form itself is not gender-specific. If the context leaves the possessor unspecified, the male relative named by father does not independently settle the possessor’s gender.
The modern Sindhi examples also distinguish singular and plural identification with آهي and آهِنِ. A Bodo family message about one relative must not acquire several relatives merely because the target contains a respectful or compact person expression. Read the target noun phrase and predicate together: attachment, politeness, grammatical gender and actual number contribute different information to the same message.
Language references