Filipino to Pashto: a singular past verb can accompany several actors
Filipino identifies the actor separately from the affected item
NIU illustrates Binili nila ang kotse, describing people who bought a car, and Nilinis namin ang bahay kahapon, describing a house cleaned by the speaker’s group yesterday. In these Tagalog-based Filipino constructions, the ng-pronouns identify plural actors while the item bought or cleaned is singular. The actor’s plurality and the item’s number are independent information.
A Pashto translation must preserve both. If several people cleaned one house, the target should not become one person cleaning several houses. Looking only at a verb ending to count the actors is unsafe because Pashto past active transitives organize case and agreement differently from their non-past counterparts. The source’s plural pronoun remains evidence about the workers even when target agreement follows another participant.
Past active transitive agreement follows the object
The Pashto UD description states that active transitive past clauses have an oblique subject and ordinarily a direct-case object. Agreement in person and number follows the object; third-person past forms also distinguish gender. This contrasts with the subject agreement described for non-past clauses. It is a target grammatical pattern, not a signal that the action suddenly has a different performer.
For the Filipino house-cleaning example, a target past active transitive construction can therefore reflect the singular house rather than the plural cleaners in its agreement. The group must still be represented as the actor. Changing the house to plural simply to make a target verb look compatible with plural workers would alter the work described; changing the workers to singular would discard the source pronoun.
Grammatical gender supplies another independent target choice. The Pashto gender documentation lists kor, house, as masculine, while explaining that grammatical gender in such nouns need not correspond to sex. Agreement connected to the house does not reveal whether the people who cleaned it were men or women. A translation should not invent the cleaners’ gender from an inanimate object’s grammatical classification.
Do not turn the agreement pattern into an unrequested passive
The Pashto description distinguishes these active past transitives from intransitive and passive constructions, whose sole subject is direct. Thus an oblique actor in the active pattern does not mean that the actor was acted upon, nor require removing that actor from the account. The Filipino cleaning group should remain the people who carried out the work.
This direction benefits from tracking the actor group and the affected item throughout the sentence. The source can explicitly name several buyers or cleaners while Pashto marks agreement with one item. Those facts can coexist without contradiction. Keeping the two counts separate preserves the original event: the same people performed it, the same car or house was involved, and the target verb follows the agreement pattern appropriate to the chosen past construction.
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