Estonian to Bangla: feeling cold is not possessing cold water
The person experiencing the temperature matters
EKI illustrates külm with a request to close the window because the speaker feels cold. The clause mul on külm reports a sensation. It is different from describing cold water or a cold winter, which the same entry also illustrates. A Bangla translation needs the person’s experience, not an assertion that the person owns a cold object.
This is particularly relevant because Estonian olema also participates in possession expressions. The dictionary separately lists having cars and lacking time under the same verb. Recognising on is therefore only the beginning: identify whether the whole clause attributes a quality, locates an object, reports availability or describes how somebody feels.
Bangla can put the experiencer in the genitive
Thompson gives tar śīt kôrche as a Bangla sensation example meaning that someone feels cold. The pronoun is genitive and the finite verb is third person. The construction does not simply describe a person performing an action called cold. Its grammatical arrangement helps express the person experiencing the sensation.
A second attested example, amar ghum pacche, describes the speaker feeling sleepy. This shows why translating every Estonian on with one unchanged target equivalent would be unreliable. Bangla sensation constructions can use different predicates; the Estonian shared auxiliary does not select the same lexical verb for cold and sleepiness.
In an original Estonian message, a person can feel cold while a drink remains warm. A target sentence that makes the drink cold instead has relocated the property. Likewise, a statement about a chilly room does not necessarily assert that a named occupant feels cold. The experiencer and the object whose temperature is described must be kept separate.
A location-shaped Estonian form need not name a place
EKI’s personal-pronoun paradigm gives minul and its shorter form mul as adessive forms, distinct from genitive minu or mu. The cold expression uses that particular source construction. It does not require the Bangla translation to reproduce a physical location meaning equivalent to on me.
For an original Estonian report about a child feeling cold, identify the child as experiencer before considering a target genitive construction. A separate genitive phrase in the same message might instead identify the owner of a coat. Similar case terminology across the explanation does not make those relationships interchangeable. A coat’s owner and the person feeling cold can be different people.
Thompson distinguishes genitive experiencer structures from possessive-existential structures. A genitive animate phrase can therefore appear in more than one kind of Bangla sentence. Its presence alone cannot establish whether the target reports a sensation or possession; the predicate and complete construction supply the distinction.
The practical comparison is between relationships rather than isolated case names. The Estonian source can compactly identify a sensation through mul on, while Bangla organises the experiencer and predicate differently. Preserve who feels cold, whether an object’s temperature is actually described, and any separately stated ownership. That gives a useful interpretation of the message without mistaking every familiar form of be for the same construction.
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