Greek to Burmese: asking who someone is and who performs an action
A person question does not always ask for the actor
Greek questions about people can ask for an identity, an actor or another participant in an event. The interrogative forms ποιος, ποια and ποιο distinguish gender, and the broader case system helps identify relationships within a sentence. A translation into Burmese must preserve what is unknown, rather than treating every Greek person-question as the same request for a name.
Northern Illinois University’s Burmese lesson contrasts an identity question with a question before a verb. သူ ဘယ်သူလဲ asks who a person is. ဘယ်သူ သွားသလဲ asks who goes. The first identifies someone; the second identifies the participant performing an action. Replacing one with the other can change the answer expected even when the conversation concerns the same people.
Greek case and the predicate help recover the missing role
In a Greek event question, determine whether the unknown person performs the action or receives it. Modern Greek uses nominative subjects and accusative direct objects, with genitive marking among the ways of expressing indirect objects. These distinctions provide clues which cannot be recovered simply by locating the first noun-like word. Greek word order can vary, so the question’s opening position is not itself proof that the interrogative is the actor.
For Burmese, the cited lesson illustrates a separate construction involving a companion: နဲ့ follows the interrogative expression. A Greek question about who comes and one about whom a person comes with therefore ask for different participants. The visitor might already be known while their companion is unknown. Translating both as an actor question would request information the source has already supplied and lose the actual question.
The activity may be wished for rather than happening
The Burmese lesson further separates an ongoing activity, a wish to perform an activity and an ability to perform it through different postverbal particles. Greek can distribute comparable meanings across a governing verb and another clause introduced by να. The source combination has to be read as a whole: the embedded action is not automatically an assertion that it is taking place.
For example, a Greek question about who wants to leave concerns willingness. A question about who can leave concerns ability or circumstances. An actor question about an actual departure makes a third kind of claim. Choosing the Burmese construction on the basis of the departure verb alone would collapse these differences, even if the person-question itself remained well formed.
Identity questions also deserve attention when Greek uses a form of είμαι. Greek employs this verb across several nonverbal constructions, including identity, property and location. Its presence does not mean that every question has the same interpretation. Establish whether the unknown information is a person’s identity, a quality or a place before using the Burmese identity pattern illustrated above.
The practical method is to recover the question’s missing information before reorganizing its words: identify the person role, the relationship to any companion and whether the action is actual, desired or possible. Burmese question endings and postverbal material express distinctions that Greek may distribute elsewhere, so matching isolated question words is insufficient.
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