Bodo to Sinhala: case forms can reflect control and experience rather than a copied source ending
A marked source object and a Sinhala experiencer are different relationships
Krishna Boro’s Bodo analysis associates object marking with referential and discourse prominence, including human reference and specificity. Carmen Jany’s spoken Sinhala study describes case selection shaped by animacy, volition and the semantics of the clause. These are not matching systems. A person receiving an overt Bodo object ending does not automatically require a Sinhala experiencer construction simply because both participants are human.
Jany illustrates mamə in an ordinary report of running and maawə in an involuntary falling construction. The latter participant is still the one falling; its non-nominative case does not introduce somebody else as the actor. For a Bodo account of an accident, the target’s case form must be assessed with the event and degree of control, rather than labeled wrong solely because it is not an ordinary subject-shaped pronoun.
This matters when a Bodo sentence foregrounds an affected person. The source’s prominence can draw attention to that person without resolving every target choice about agency. Keep separate who is involved, what happens to them and whether the source presents the action as controlled. A Sinhala construction can distribute those contributions between the noun form and the verb rather than reproduce one Bodo marker.
An event manner is not the same as an event stage
Boro and Basumatary describe Bodo adverbial suffixes with meanings including acting by mistake, repetition and intense involvement. In a Sinhala translation, the fact that an event happened accidentally is different from the fact that it has just begun. Do not let the source verb’s several contributions collapse into one general statement about an action: a beginning can be intentional or accidental, and either can involve the same participant.
The Bodo chapter distinguishes -ha, about to, from -zen, just starting: only the latter necessarily entails an actual beginning. If a source reports someone on the verge of an action that was interrupted, choosing a Sinhala construction for an involuntary occurrence would still assert that something occurred. Lack of control and lack of realization are different meanings. The target needs the source’s event status as well as its participant relationship.
A changed verb meaning can matter more than a familiar root
Jany’s Sinhala table contrasts listening with hearing and watching with happening to watch. The study also cautions that the connection between involitive form and lack of control is not perfectly uniform. A Bodo reader should consequently compare the particular source action with the Sinhala lexical construction, rather than assume a single target vowel change always expresses accidentally.
Bodo -hab, for instance, can describe intense attention to a newspaper in the corpus chapter. A Sinhala result merely reporting an accidental sensory impression would not preserve that absorbed attention. Conversely, a Bodo account of an unintended event should not be recast as deliberate observation simply because the target verb is easier to recognize. Meaning differences between related target verbs can alter the account’s agency.
The two source systems also resist a simple one-ending check. Bodo object prominence does not by itself identify the actor, and spoken Sinhala case is not in one-to-one correspondence with grammatical role. For a Bodo narrative involving someone noticing, doing and undergoing different things, trace those roles through each target clause. Retaining all the right people’s names does not guarantee the same distribution of perception, control and affectedness.
Language references