Bosnian to Latvian: an obligation can change both subject and object cases
The person responsible can appear in the dative
Bosnian case marking distinguishes a nominative subject from dative and accusative participants. Latvian obligation constructions can reorganise those familiar relationships. The person required to act may be expressed in the dative rather than the ordinary nominative subject form.
Kalnača and Lokmane contrast Es daru darbu, I do the job, with Man ir jādara darbs, I must do the job. The source-like action statement and the obligation statement do not merely differ by inserting an independent word for must. The case pattern changes as part of the target construction.
For a Bosnian instruction assigning a task to the writer, man identifies the person responsible, not a recipient to whom someone else gives the task’s object. A target dative should therefore not be treated as evidence that the translator changed the actor. Interpret it with the obligation predicate.
A nominative-looking object can remain the affected item
The same Latvian contrast changes darbu to darbs. The noun still denotes the job to be done, despite its nominative form in the debitive construction. A Bosnian reader accustomed to nominative actors should not automatically make that noun the person or thing performing the action.
This matters when the source tells one person to process an item for another person. The responsible actor, affected item and recipient remain separate. The target may mark the actor dative and the ordinary noun object nominative, while another relation identifies the recipient. Counting case labels without the predicate can assign every role incorrectly.
The grammar qualifies the object pattern: first- and second-person objects and the reflexive pronoun remain accusative in the illustrated debitive environment. This is not a rule that every object in every obligation construction must be rewritten as nominative. The actual target object and structure determine its form.
The time of necessity differs from completion of the task
The reference contrasts present obligation with mums bija jādara darbs, expressing that we had to do the job. The past auxiliary locates the necessity in the past. It does not independently prove that the group finished the job.
A Bosnian report can say that a task was required but left undone, or that it was required and completed. A Latvian translation should retain that distinction instead of treating a past obligation as a completed-action report. The source’s result information must be expressed where it belongs.
The grammar also notes that present ir can be omitted in the debitive. A short target instruction without a visible copula may consequently remain complete. Adding a new lexical verb merely to match a source word count can damage the intended construction.
For this pair, read the Bosnian sentence for responsible person, affected item and timing of the requirement before constructing Latvian. The target can change case assignments and omit a present auxiliary while preserve the source roles. Its accuracy depends on the complete debitive pattern, not on a demand that every noun retain the same nominative, dative or accusative label as in Bosnian.
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