Bosnian to Pashto: a past-tense verb ending may identify the person seen
Identify the participants before matching a personal ending
Columbia’s Bosnian lesson separates subject pronouns from object forms and demonstrates clitic objects within a question such as Vidiš li ga? The source distinguishes the person doing the seeing from the person seen. Those roles must survive translation even when the target places different information on its verb.
David’s Pashto grammar illustrates tā zə wə́-lid-əm with the meaning you saw me. The first-person ending belongs to agreement with the person seen, not the person who saw. Reading that ending as though it always identified the actor would reverse the event.
The same actor does not keep one case form across the tense contrast
The Pashto grammar describes a split in ordinary case-marking and agreement: present-tense transitive clauses agree with their subject, while past-tense transitive clauses agree with their direct object. In the past construction, the transitive subject has oblique marking. The account also recognizes constructions with other patterns, so this is not a rule for every possible predicate.
For an original Bosnian message contrasting someone seeing a visitor now with having seen that visitor yesterday, retain the same observer and observed person across both clauses. The change of time can require a change in Pashto grammatical packaging. Keeping every pronoun unchanged because the participants are unchanged can erase the target distinction; changing their semantic roles to fit a remembered ending is equally misleading.
An omitted target pronoun can be the object rather than the subject
David gives tā wə́-lid-əm as another expression of you saw me, with the first-person object recoverable from agreement. This demonstrates why an absent separate pronoun does not necessarily mean that the corresponding participant has disappeared.
A Bosnian source may make both people explicit for contrast: the listener saw the speaker rather than a third visitor. A target construction without a separately written first-person pronoun can still identify the speaker as the person seen. However, omitting information needed for that contrast may weaken the intended emphasis. Distinguish recoverability from emphasis: agreement can supply a participant’s identity without automatically reproducing the source’s contrast with another person.
Bosnian clitic position does not determine the Pashto clitic’s role
The Bosnian lesson places certain short pronouns in an early clitic cluster. Pashto also has second-position weak pronouns, but David documents restrictions on their grammatical roles: in transitive clauses they can represent present objects or past agents. Their similar positional description therefore does not establish identical functions.
For a Bosnian report about who contacted whom, first determine whether the action is current or past and which participant is the actor. Then interpret any Pashto weak pronoun within that construction. An early short form may look reassuringly familiar to a Bosnian reader while referring to a different grammatical role. The practical aim is to preserve the original contact: a report that a neighbor saw the speaker must not become a report that the speaker saw the neighbor simply because a clitic or personal ending occupies a recognizable position.
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