Bosnian to Northern Kurdish: a past actor may appear in an oblique form
The target case pattern changes with the construction
Bosnian uses nominative subjects and distinguishes affected objects through its case system. Northern Kurdish, or Kurmanji, has a different arrangement in past transitive constructions. A target actor can appear in an oblique personal form without becoming the person affected by the action.
Thackston contrasts min ew dît, I saw him, with wî ez dîtim, he saw me. The actor’s form and the predicate agreement differ from a simple nominative-subject pattern. Reading min automatically as an object because an English gloss sometimes says me would reverse the source participants.
For a Bosnian report that a colleague saw the writer, identify the source actor and affected person first. The Kurmanji ending can agree with the patient in this past construction. A first-person ending consequently need not mean that the writer did the seeing. The complete case-and-agreement pattern determines the relationship.
Coming and seeing do not use one universal past template
Thackston’s intransitive paradigm includes ez hatim, I came, where the person form and agreement follow a different pattern from the transitive seeing examples. A Bosnian source moving from arrival to seeing can therefore require a change in target personal grammar even when the same person performs both actions.
This is particularly useful in a short narrative: the writer arrived and then saw someone. Repeating the first target personal form mechanically beside every subsequent past verb can ignore the construction required by a transitive action. The source actor remains the same while the target case pattern changes.
The grammar also explains coordinated sequences where a past transitive verb affects the marking of the shared actor. A target should be assessed as a sentence rather than corrected word by word from a simplified claim that an intransitive verb always forces one visible subject shape. The selected sequence and its predicate types matter.
Wanting to say can require two forms of the same person
Thackston illustrates min xwest ku ez bibêjim for I wanted to say. The first predicate belongs to a past transitive construction; its subjunctive complement uses a nominative personal form. Min and ez refer to the same speaker in different grammatical environments.
A Bosnian source can express one person’s intention without repeating an independent subject in both clauses. The Kurmanji repetition need not introduce two different people. Conversely, removing one personal form merely to make the target shorter can damage the construction needed to express the intended relation between wanting and saying.
The Bosnian specification records personal case distinctions, so a reader can use those source clues to determine the actors of the two actions before building the target. The grammar notes regional variation and exceptions in Kurmanji past alignment; the examples here support these specific constructions rather than an assertion that every past predicate behaves identically.
For this direction, distinguish an actor from a patient through the complete target pattern, compare intransitive arrival with transitive perception, and retain the actor relationship across an intention complement. Familiar personal roots and a plausible past-tense ending do not independently prove that the Bosnian participants have been preserved.
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