Bodo to Telugu: a noun-predicate ending is not a Bodo possessive suffix
Similar romanized material can perform unrelated jobs
Narzary’s Bodo paradigm uses -ni in possessive pronouns. In Troy Messick’s discussion of Telugu nominal predicates, vidyaardhi-ni occurs in a first-person statement meaning I am a student. The Telugu ending in that example marks first-person predicate agreement, not ownership by a student.
The superficial resemblance in romanization must not guide transfer. A Bodo expression identifying somebody’s possession and a Bodo statement identifying the speaker’s role have different structures. Translating both through a target sequence that merely looks familiar could turn ownership into an assertion about who the speaker is. Analyze the source relation before interpreting any matching letters in a target grammatical explanation.
Changing the subject can change the predicate noun
Messick contrasts that first-person Telugu example with vidyaardhi-wi in a second-person statement about being a student. His presentation limits overt pronominal suffixes of this type to particular person–number combinations; it does not claim that every Telugu predicate noun takes the same visible ending.
Narzary’s Bodo paradigm distinguishes first-person and second-person reference independently of its possessive series. For a source exchange where one participant identifies themself and then asks about the other participant’s role, retain that switch. Reusing the first Telugu nominal form because the occupation remains student would ignore the changing participant relationship. The noun’s lexical meaning alone is insufficient to construct the target assertion.
Reported speech can introduce another agreement perspective
Messick’s research investigates Telugu embedded clauses where a non-first-person pronoun occurs with first-person verbal agreement under speech or attitude predicates. His analysis is based on specified consultation data and grammatical conditions. This is a scoped reported-speech phenomenon, not a license to mix person endings throughout ordinary target prose.
A Bodo report that somebody said they ran requires identification of both the reporting participant and the runner. An apparent first-person target ending inside a suitable reported construction should not automatically be interpreted as introducing the current narrator as runner. Conversely, finding such an ending does not prove that the intended Bodo report has been preserved: the embedded reference must still identify the correct participant.
Gender-neutral Bodo reference does not select every Telugu form
Narzary’s personal-pronoun description does not distinguish a male from a female third-person referent. Messick’s Telugu paradigm includes gender-related and formality-related contrasts. Selecting a target personal expression can consequently require information supplied by the source antecedent rather than the Bodo pronoun considered alone.
For an original narrative that introduces a sister and later reports what that person said about studying, the earlier kinship identification remains relevant when building Telugu reference. The reporting construction, the predicate’s person marking, and the person’s identification must work together. Do not infer a new speaker from a predicate ending, a new owner from a familiar-looking suffix, or an unspecified gender from the absence of a distinction in the Bodo pronoun. These are separate interpretations that converge in the final Telugu sentence.
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