German to Sinhala: distinguish an experiencer from a deliberate actor
German ich does not force a nominative Sinhala experiencer
German can use a nominative subject in Ich höre Musik, even though hearing need not be a deliberate action. Jany’s analysis of spoken Sinhala describes sensation and cognition constructions with a dative-marked experiencer and an involitive verb stem. The fact that the German source begins with ich therefore does not determine the case of the corresponding Sinhala participant. Its role in the selected target construction matters.
Jany gives maṭə as the experiencer in a hearing example. The translation is still about the person hearing music; dative marking does not turn that person into somebody receiving a delivered object. This matters when a German account describes a sound becoming audible unexpectedly. A target sentence should preserve the perception, without being forced into an action pattern solely because the German subject has nominative form.
Seeing and listening cannot be reduced to a case substitution
The paper distinguishes verb stems and constructions rather than claiming that all perception uses one case. Its data include a nominative participant in a sentence translated as seeing a house, as well as a dative experiencer with another seeing construction. Thus changing every German ich associated with sehen into a dative pronoun would be as unreliable as retaining nominative automatically.
An original German contrast between deliberately looking for a signal and suddenly seeing one illustrates the decision the translator needs to make. The first concerns an intentional activity; the second can foreground a perceptual experience. Those meanings interact with the available Sinhala verbs and their constructions. Determine what the German clause asserts about the event, then choose the target expression and its required marking together. Case alone is not a substitute for lexical selection.
Preserve understanding without inventing a recipient
Jany also documents a dative-marked child in a construction meaning that the child understands a story. In German, Das Kind versteht die Geschichte has a nominative subject and an accusative object. Mapping the German case labels directly would not reproduce the cited Sinhala pattern. Nor should the target dative be interpreted as an added claim that somebody told the story to the child: understanding and receiving a narration are different events.
In a German classroom report, distinguishing that a learner heard an explanation from that the learner understood it is often the central point. The Sinhala rendering must keep the cognition claim rather than replace it with the physically observable act of listening. It should also retain negation: a statement that understanding did not occur is not necessarily an accusation that the learner refused to pay attention. These distinctions come from the German proposition and the chosen Sinhala predicate, not from a universal equation between nominative and intention or dative and inability. The cited research concerns spoken Sinhala; its analysis should not be presented as a complete description of every written register.
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