Bodo to Uzbek Latin: case roles survive even when the sentence order looks familiar
A similar predicate position does not make the suffixes interchangeable
Basumatary’s Bodo examples put personal participants before the predicate, including a third person calling the speaker. The Uzbek Universal Dependencies reference likewise describes subject-object-verb as the dominant order, while allowing other arrangements. That resemblance can make a target look reassuringly familiar without establishing that its participants are correct.
Bodo distinguishes -khɯu for the affected person in the calling example, -nɯ for a recipient and -ni for an owner relation. Uzbek has its own case distinctions, including accusative, dative and genitive. Their functions must be checked through the target construction rather than transferred by matching source suffix positions.
A Bodo request involving another person’s book and the writer as recipient should not make the writer the owner simply because a personal expression occurs beside the noun in both languages. First recover who does the bringing, whose item is brought and to whom. A familiar final predicate does not repair a reversed owner-recipient relationship.
An attached question marker is part of the target word
The Uzbek reference notes that the question suffix -mi is written adjacent to its host. A target question can therefore contain a meaningful grammatical component without introducing a separate word corresponding to an English question particle.
For a Bodo question about whether a person will come, a copied Uzbek form should not be split arbitrarily just to make each meaning appear as a separate token. Conversely, the presence of -mi does not identify which person comes or whether the question asks about ability, an intention or an expected event. Those distinctions depend on the predicate and participants.
The reference lists interrogative forms such as qaysi for a which-type choice and qancha for a quantity question. A Bodo request to identify a particular item is different from one asking its quantity. A general question mark and a plausible noun cannot compensate for selecting the wrong kind of interrogative.
Gender-neutral personal reference does not remove number or self-reference
Bodo bi does not require a male-versus-female personal distinction. Uzbek also lacks grammatical gender in the cited description. This can allow a target personal reference to retain that breadth without choosing a sex unsupported by the source.
However, Uzbek still distinguishes personal number and marks person and number on finite verbs. A target that avoids a gender choice must not thereby ignore whether the Bodo referent is one person or a group. Basumatary distinguishes ordinary and honorific plural formations, so a compact source expression can carry number information that needs to remain recoverable.
The Uzbek reference also identifies o‘z as reflexive. A source referring back to the actor and one referring to a different owner should not be collapsed into the same target relationship merely because both third persons are gender-neutral. For this pair, separate owner, recipient and actor first; then check question type, number and whether a reference points back to the subject. The shared absence of pronoun gender solves only one part of that analysis.
Language references