Filipino to Inuinnaqtun: preserve the hearer, the sound and the participant reference
Determine what the Filipino pronoun is doing
Northern Illinois University’s Tagalog material assigns several functions to NG-pronouns. They can identify possessors, actors outside focus, or non-focused objects. Its Binili nila ang kotse identifies the people buying the car, although nila belongs to the same set that can mark their ownership in a noun phrase. For Filipino into Inuinnaqtun, the source pronoun’s set alone therefore does not tell you whether to build an owner, actor or object expression.
A report involving a person hearing something needs the same distinction: identify the hearer and what is heard before choosing a target verb form. Do not assume that whichever Filipino participant appears next to the verb is automatically the affected object. The source’s verb construction and markers contribute to that interpretation. This is a comparison with Tagalog-based Filipino patterns, not a claim that all Philippine languages use the same case system.
The Inuinnaqtun dictionary separates two kinds of hearing
Ohokak, Kadlun and Harnum’s Inuinnaqtun dictionary distinguishes tuhaajuq, hearing a continuous sound, from tuhaqtuq, hearing a short sound. It separately lists tuhaajaa and tuhaqtaa for hearing him, her or it with the corresponding continuous-versus-short distinction. These four attested forms show why a general hear gloss is insufficient for a careful lexical choice. They are dictionary illustrations rather than a new paradigm generated by substituting endings.
For a Filipino account, a sustained sound and a brief sound may require different target wording even though an English paraphrase uses hear in both cases. Conversely, these dictionary contrasts do not prove that every source report has specified sound duration. Do not invent a continuous noise merely because one target entry is more familiar. The dictionary was revised for local Inuinnaqtun with speakers and elders; borrowing a superficially similar form from an unrelated online Inuktitut lesson would bypass that documented variety.
A missing separate pronoun need not mean a missing person
Compton’s research explains that Inuktut commonly omits ergative and absolutive personal pronouns whose participant features are represented on the verb. It presents Inuinnaqtun personal-pronoun data explicitly, while also discussing other varieties separately. An Inuinnaqtun result can therefore keep a Filipino participant in the grammar without reproducing every separate source pronoun as a separate target word. Count the interpreted participants, not simply the written pronouns.
The same research notes that overt pronouns regularly occur in oblique cases, verbless constructions and focus contexts. Omission is consequently not a universal permission to remove whichever reference seems repetitive. In a Filipino hearing report, distinguishing the listener from a person being heard remains essential even if target verbal morphology carries information expressed separately in the source. If an overt reference is retained for contrast, that contrast also belongs to the message. A shorter target expression and a reduced participant inventory are different things.
Language references