Fijian to Tibetan: wanting to fish is not observing a fishing trip
Keep via inside the claim being made
Schütz and Komaitai’s Fijian lessons give Au via siwa for wanting to fish and Au via moce for wanting to sleep. In each, via contributes the wish or inclination toward the following activity. Translating either as a plain report that the speaker is already fishing or sleeping removes that contribution. Before choosing a Tibetan sentence ending, preserve the difference between wanting an activity, starting it and reporting that it is happening.
The first-person Au also does not provide a complete instruction for choosing Tibetan evidential marking. Tournadre and LaPolla distinguish personal knowledge associated with self-awareness from sensory access, including internal bodily sensations, in their Standard Tibetan examples. The relevant question is how the speaker presents access to the situation being described. A Fijian first-person subject identifies the speaker as a participant; it does not independently label that kind of access.
The researchers illustrate self-awareness with nga bsam.blo btang-gi.yod, a report of thinking about something. This example explains a type of personal access; it is not a ready-made translation of Au via siwa. A translation of the Fijian wish still needs a Tibetan expression of wanting. Replacing the lexical meaning with thinking merely to obtain an example containing an egophoric ending would change the message before evidential marking was even considered.
A bodily state is not interchangeable with an intention
The same study gives nga mgo na-gi.’dug for having a headache. It discusses this as internal sensory access even though the experiencer is first person. The example shows why a rule assigning every first-person Fijian sentence the same Tibetan ending would be unreliable. The paper’s discussion concerns Standard Tibetan, with additional distinctions among Tibetic varieties elsewhere; its examples do not justify a universal rule for every language or variety called Tibetan.
For Au via moce, do not add a diagnosis or a physical cause that the Fijian sentence has not supplied. Wanting to sleep may occur in a discussion of plans, tiredness or a request for quiet, but those situations are not identical. A Tibetan rendering should convey the intended desire or state in context rather than replace it with a headache, an already completed sleep or an externally witnessed act. The independently attested Tibetan examples demonstrate contrasts, not interchangeable equivalents.
The Fijian lessons also distinguish wanting to eat from wanting food, using different constructions in their exercises. That difference reinforces the need to preserve what the wish is directed toward before resolving Tibetan grammatical choices. A desired activity is not automatically an object already obtained, and a wish is not evidence that somebody has performed the activity. Keeping that scope intact prevents an evidentially polished Tibetan sentence from confidently reporting an event that the Fijian speaker only wanted to happen.
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