Greek to Amharic: the person being told is different from the person who tells
A weak Greek pronoun still identifies an important participant
A short Greek message can use a weak pronoun to identify the person who receives information. In an Amharic translation, that recipient can be expressed within the written verb. The change in word boundaries does not make the participant optional, and it must not change the recipient into the person doing the telling.
The Greek dictionary’s entry for εσύ distinguishes strong forms used independently or emphatically from weak forms used with a verb. Its examples include the weak genitive σου. Thus a short source expression may identify you without repeating an independent εσύ. The absence of a full pronoun does not mean that the message has no second-person participant.
The Amharic documentation distinguishes subject agreement from object clitics attached to verbs. Its pair ነገርኩህ and ነገርኩሽ both means I told you, with different forms for a male and female singular recipient. The subject remains I in both. The target difference therefore concerns the person receiving the information, not a change in who spoke.
The target may need a distinction that the Greek recipient form does not provide
In an original message saying I told you yesterday, the Greek recipient expression need not identify the listener as male or female. The corresponding Amharic object form can require that distinction. It should come from the person actually addressed, where the conversation identifies them, rather than from a guess about who usually receives the kind of information being discussed.
Compare the intentions I told you and you told me. Both involve the same two people and the same kind of speech event, but their roles are reversed. A translation that recognizes the second-person form yet assigns it to subject agreement rather than the object clitic can produce the wrong direction of communication. Preserving the vocabulary tell and the date would not repair that reversal.
The distinction is particularly useful in a correction: I told you, not your colleague. An emphatic Greek pronoun can identify the intended recipient more strongly, while an ordinary weak form may simply continue the conversation. The Amharic translation should preserve the recipient’s identity and any real contrast, without interpreting a strong source form as a different person from the weak form referring to the same listener.
The Amharic documentation also notes that subject agreement can remain present when an explicit subject noun occurs. A target verb carrying participant information alongside a name does not automatically describe an additional person. Likewise, a Greek sentence naming the recipient and also using a pronoun must be interpreted for its actual reference, rather than counted as two separate recipients by word count alone.
For this direction, trace the communication event: who speaks, who receives the information, and whether the source contrasts that recipient with somebody else. Then choose the Amharic participant forms for those roles. This preserves a compact Greek message while addressing a target distinction that is not visible in the source recipient pronoun itself.
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