Greek to Dari: an inference about a completed event is not an instruction
Must can express a conclusion rather than a duty
Greek Πρέπει να έχει έρθει can express the conclusion that somebody must have come. In that reading, the speaker is evaluating evidence about an arrival, not ordering someone to arrive. Dari needs to retain that distinction between an inferred completed event and an action somebody is required to perform.
Adam Baker’s Dari grammar treats the perfect subjunctive as a way to express subjunctive meanings about completed actions. It contrasts a possible completed arrival with a stronger conclusion about the arrival. The grammatical construction matters because a bare obligation to come would leave both the completion and the evidential interpretation behind.
Completed does not mean directly witnessed
Baker illustrates unʌ ʃʌjad ʌmada bʌʃan, they might have come, beside unʌ bʌjad ʌmada bʌʃan, they must have come. These forms use the grammar’s pronunciation notation. Their difference concerns the strength of the speaker’s conclusion, while both discuss an arrival as completed or potentially completed.
An original Greek comparison makes the practical distinction visible: Ίσως έχει φτάσει, perhaps he or she has arrived, versus Πρέπει να έχει φτάσει, he or she must have arrived. The first leaves the arrival relatively open; the second presents a stronger inference. Neither automatically means that the speaker personally watched the arrival.
Imagine receiving a notification that a visitor’s appointment has begun, while the visitor has not answered a message. A Greek speaker may infer arrival from that notification. Translating the statement as an unqualified eyewitness report would increase certainty; translating it as a future instruction would change the event’s time and purpose.
Do not let a completed form become a deadline
Greek πρέπει also appears in requirements, so the surrounding verb construction and situation are essential. Πρέπει να έρθει αύριο, he or she must come tomorrow, gives an obligation about an upcoming arrival. It should not receive the same target construction as a conclusion that the person has already come.
The Dari grammar places the auxiliary portion of the perfect subjunctive in a subjunctive form after a participial element. A source perfect cannot be preserved by retaining only a target word for must. The target also needs the construction identifying the action as completed or hypothetically completed.
A negative conclusion requires equal care. Saying that someone probably has not arrived is different from saying that they are forbidden to arrive. Greek negation, the modal reading, and the event’s completion interact. Replacing the whole phrase with a familiar prohibition would convert a judgment about events into a rule for behavior.
The Centre for the Greek Language’s teaching materials distinguish expressions of possibility from expressions of obligation in their discussion of modality. That distinction supplies the source-side question for this pair: is the speaker estimating what happened, or specifying what ought to happen? The Dari perfect-subjunctive evidence then supports the completed-event interpretation without requiring an invented one-to-one equivalence for every occurrence of Greek πρέπει.
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