Bulgarian to Northern Kurdish: the past can change how participants are marked
Follow the actor through the change of tense
Bulgarian identifies grammatical person through pronouns and verb forms, but a Kurmanji past transitive construction does not simply preserve the present-tense arrangement. Thackston’s reference grammar distinguishes direct and oblique pronouns and describes their use in past transitive clauses. A Bulgarian account of who saw whom needs its participant roles reconstructed in the Kurmanji construction, not assigned by the familiar appearance of one pronoun.
The grammar illustrates Ez te dibînim for seeing the addressee in the present, and Te ez dîtim for the addressee seeing the speaker in the past. The forms ez and te appear in both, but the actual agent and patient must be interpreted with the entire clause. In a Bulgarian witness account, matching a recurring pronoun to one fixed grammatical role would be an unreliable way to follow the event.
A past narrative is not necessarily passive
The unfamiliar participant marking in a Kurmanji past transitive clause should not automatically be interpreted as an instruction to translate a Bulgarian active sentence passively. Thackston treats these clauses within the language’s own ergative pattern. The target can describe the same actor performing the same action even when its grammatical organization differs from Bulgarian.
For a Bulgarian narrative alternating movement and an action on an object, establish which predicates are transitive. A person arriving and a person seeing somebody are not interchangeable construction types. The target changes need to follow the Kurmanji predicate rather than a rule that every Bulgarian past sentence receives the same rearrangement. This prevents an otherwise coherent story from repeatedly shifting the apparent responsibility for its actions.
Possessive wording has a separate source of change
Kurmanji noun phrases also use construct forms connecting a noun to a following possessor or description. Bulgarian can express possession with a possessive form or a phrase introduced by на. A reference to the actor’s belongings therefore needs its own noun-phrase reconstruction, separate from the case and agreement choices in the surrounding past clause.
Thackston’s pronoun examples include ji min, from the speaker, and ji wî, from a male third person. They demonstrate that a pronoun can take an oblique form for a prepositional relationship as well as occur in the past-transitive system. Do not assume that every oblique-looking target pronoun has the same job. Identify whether it marks a source, a possessor or a participant in the action.
Use the Northern Kurdish system selected
Northern Kurdish has grammatical gender distinctions and direct-oblique morphology that cannot be replaced by rules for Central Kurdish. Bulgarian’s three-gender system likewise does not provide the target noun’s gender automatically. Select the Kurmanji lexical item and the form demanded by its phrase.
For this direction, the recurring practical issue is that the same Bulgarian participant can require different Kurmanji forms as the action, tense or prepositional relationship changes. Those changes are not random spelling variation. Reading the actor, affected person and surrounding possession independently allows the target to retain the Bulgarian account’s meaning without imposing Bulgarian grammar on Northern Kurdish.
Language references