Greek to Setswana: distinguish a recipient, a beneficiary and the place used for an action
Greek prepositions identify several different relationships
The Centre for the Greek Language explains that σε can mark location or direction and can also introduce a verbal object. Its giving example distinguishes the notebook from the classmate receiving it. A Setswana translation must preserve those roles even if it does not use a separate preposition corresponding to the Greek recipient phrase.
The same reference lists several functions for με, including accompaniment, manner, contents and instrument. A Greek phrase with this preposition therefore does not automatically identify another person participating in the action. The object used to perform an action and a companion present during it require different interpretations in the target.
For a practical message about giving or preparing something, identify who receives it, who benefits and what location or instrument is involved. The source preposition is evidence, but the complete Greek predicate establishes the relationship. Setswana may encode some of that information through the verb and object construction instead of a sequence of matching prepositional phrases.
Two target object markers can preserve two different participants
Pretorius, Berg and Pretorius’s primary study gives Morutabana o fa ngwana dibuka: the teacher gives the child books. The recipient and transferred items occur as distinct objects. Its related examples represent one or both through verbal object markers. A Greek sentence with a direct object and a recipient phrase can consequently become a Setswana construction containing more than one object index.
Their shorter Ene o tla mo thusa illustrates a separate point: an object marker can express the affected person within the verbal construction. A Greek weak pronoun referring to him or her need not become another independent target word. Conversely, two object markers need not describe two copies of the same person.
The study emphasizes Setswana’s disjunctive orthography, where some verbal material is written with spaces even though it belongs to a larger grammatical construction. A Greek-to-Setswana comparison based on counting written words will therefore be misleading. Trace each object marker to its referent and its noun class rather than treating every space-delimited element as an independent noun or pronoun.
Cooking in a vessel can affect the target verb differently from cooking in a yard
Creissels’s primary analysis distinguishes ordinary location from a location that participates more closely in the event. His cooking comparison contrasts a yard, which merely locates the activity, with a pot that contains the food and functions as its cooking vessel. Although a Greek description can use a location phrase for either, the Setswana construction he documents distinguishes their roles.
The paper shows applicative morphology when cooking is done for children and also when the specified location is the cooking vessel. Combining the beneficiary and vessel can involve repeated applicative morphology. That is not redundant decoration to remove because the Greek source expressed the relationships with prepositions. It encodes distinctions licensed by the target verb.
Creissels also discusses noncanonical applicative uses, so the suffix cannot universally be glossed for somebody. In translating a Greek household instruction, preserve whether a phrase identifies the beneficiary, the vessel or simply the surrounding place. Do not infer an extra beneficiary from every applicative form, or replace a meaningful vessel relation with an unrelated location merely to keep the surface construction simple.
Language references