Greek to Odia: distinguish respectful agreement from the person experiencing a state
Greek plural address may refer to just one person
The Centre for the Greek Language’s professional A2 specification explicitly describes second-person plural forms used instead of singular for politeness. Its Τι κάνετε, κ. Μακρή; addresses one Mr Makris. When translating such a message into Odia, do not infer a group of recipients solely from the Greek verbal number. Preserve the single person and the respectful relationship together.
The specification also distinguishes personal pronouns used for emphasis from those used as indirect objects. Its discussion of impersonal predicates includes expressions of liking with a genitive experiencer. That gives another reason not to equate every Greek person-related ending with the same target function: respectful address, emphasis and experiencing a state belong to different constructions.
For a Greek message asking a respected colleague about a preference, resolve both questions before choosing Odia wording. Is the addressee one person or several, and is that person the grammatical subject of the chosen preference predicate? The first decision concerns address; the second concerns clause structure. One cannot safely substitute for the other.
Odia respect is not confined to addressing somebody as you
Sahoo’s primary study distinguishes the Odia second-person forms tu, tume and āpaNa, with different relationships of familiarity and respect. The Greek singular-versus-polite-plural contrast does not provide a mechanical three-way lookup. A Greek polite form identifies the need to preserve respect, while the Odia choice must express that relationship through its own pronoun and verbal system.
Her third-person examples contrast se ās-u-chh-i and se ās-u-chh-anti. Both concern one person coming; the latter carries honorific agreement. Thus an Odia report about a respected person can show plural-shaped verbal morphology even though the Greek source is simply third-person singular. Counting the target endings as extra people would misread the respectful form.
Sahoo also documents honorific distinctions in third-person genitive pronouns. In a Greek account about somebody’s belongings, respectful reference can therefore extend beyond the moment when the speaker addresses that person directly. Keep the referent constant while recognizing that Odia may mark a social distinction where the Greek possession phrase does not visibly encode one.
An experiencer construction can move agreement away from the experiencer
Patnaik’s primary analysis of non-nominative constructions gives raamaku mithaai bhala laage for Ram liking sweets. Ram has dative marking, and the author analyzes agreement with the nominative expression rather than the non-nominative experiencer. A Greek-to-Odia translation of liking must preserve who experiences the preference without forcing that person into nominative subject agreement.
The paper explicitly contrasts nominative and dative versions of liking expressions involving I and we. A change in how the experiencer is constructed changes which agreement pattern is appropriate. This is separate from the honorific contrast described by Sahoo: an unchanged-looking verb in an experiencer construction does not by itself establish that respectful reference has been lost.
Patnaik further documents genitive experiencer constructions, so dative is not a universal ending for every person undergoing a state. Compare the complete selected predicate, not an isolated case label. For a Greek preference or state description, identify the experiencer, the stimulus and the agreement controller before interpreting the Odia forms as number or politeness signals.
Language references