Bodo to Yucatec Maya: an incorporated family owner needs a complete target phrase
A short Bodo kinship expression still identifies whose relative
Basumatary gives apha as my father and bipha as his or her father. These are not ownerless family labels: their personal anchor is built into the Bodo expression. A Yucatec Maya target needs to recover that anchor even when the source does not print a separate personal word.
UADY’s possession lesson introduces in, a and u with nouns for first-, second- and third-person ownership. Its example a wich means your eye. The marker belongs with the possessed noun in that construction. A translator should therefore interpret the complete Bodo family word before choosing the target owner marker, rather than translate only its kinship meaning.
A source changing from my father to another person’s father changes the owner anchor even when the same relative noun is involved. Retaining one target marker throughout would blur that distinction. Equally, changing the target marker merely because the relative is a different sex would confuse the relative’s identity with the owner’s person.
An ownership answer cannot consist of the noun-bound marker alone
The UADY lesson separately teaches ownership replies using tia’al. Its intia’al answers that an item is mine. The lesson explicitly distinguishes such an answer from using bare in, a or u by itself.
Bodo -ni in an ordinary genitive phrase and an incorporated kinship owner both help identify a relation to a noun. A Maya reply asserting ownership of an item already named can instead require the separate tia’al construction. The source’s compactness does not justify leaving an isolated noun-bound marker as a complete target answer.
Consider a Bodo exchange first identifying a relative’s possession and then asking whose another item is. The target must maintain the owner across the exchange while allowing the grammatical construction to change from a noun phrase to an ownership assertion. Matching the first-person or third-person value alone does not establish that the reply is complete.
Apostrophes inside a Maya word do not identify a possessive ending
Bodo expresses ownership through personal morphology and case relations. Maya writing also contains short internal marks, but an apostrophe does not simply perform the role of a Bodo owner suffix. INALI’s writing standard documents glottalised consonants and several vowel distinctions as part of the language’s orthography.
The apostrophe within tia’al belongs to the written word rather than functioning as an English-style possessive mark. Deleting it because ownership is already clear from the sentence would alter the target spelling. Adding a new apostrophe after every owner would be equally unjustified.
The practical issue in this direction is therefore both grammatical and written. First recover the owner included in a Bodo family expression such as apha or bipha. Then distinguish a Maya noun accompanied by its owner marker from a standalone ownership claim. Finally preserve the spelling of that chosen construction, including meaningful internal marks. A target can identify the correct family relationship yet still be incomplete as an answer, or grammatically complete yet misspelled after punctuation has been simplified.
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