Greek to Urdu: subject and object roles survive a change of case
A Greek nominative need not remain unmarked
Greek nominal subjects normally take nominative case. Urdu permits different subject marking across constructions, as Ghulam Raza documents in his study of predication. Translating a Greek subject therefore requires preserving its role in the event rather than retaining the same case label. A target marker on the actor does not automatically make that person an object.
Raza’s example Ali=ne seb kha-ya describes Ali eating an apple. The marker ne belongs with the actor in that construction. A Greek account of the same kind of event would not need an ergative subject. The case difference is target grammar, not a change from Ali acting to somebody acting upon Ali.
Aspect matters, but it is not the only condition
The study contrasts a giving example with ne against a nonperfect example in which the subject is nominative. It also states that Urdu ergative selection depends on transitivity, tense or aspect, light-verb choice and volitionality. A Greek past-tense form should therefore not trigger ne automatically regardless of the predicate. The complete target construction has to be considered.
Greek itself distinguishes aspect as well as tense, so a source message can provide relevant information about how an event is presented. But the existence of source aspect does not establish a one-to-one mapping onto Urdu subject case. First identify the action and its participants; then select the target verbal construction and the case pattern that belongs with it.
Ko does not always identify the recipient
Raza illustrates both an unmarked apple object and an apple object marked with ko, discussing specificity in the latter construction. He also shows ko with the recipient of giving. These functions must remain distinct. A Greek direct object should not become an Urdu recipient merely because the target expression contains the same visible marker used elsewhere for recipients.
This matters in a Greek message about handing a particular item to a particular person. The item being transferred and the person receiving it have different roles. Their source case and prepositional constructions help establish those roles, but the target marker alone may not uniquely identify them. Keep the predicate’s participant structure intact while rebuilding the noun phrases.
Necessity is different from receiving an action
The same Urdu study gives nıda=ko ghAr ja-na hE for Nida having to go home. Here the ko-marked person is associated with an obligation, rather than being the recipient of something sent by another person. A Greek necessity construction with πρέπει should retain that obligation and the person it concerns. Translating ko as though it always meant to someone would misread the target sentence.
Greek word order can vary, and Urdu also permits several orders of participants before the verb. It is consequently unsafe to identify the actor solely by whichever name appears first. The case forms, predicate and meaning of the complete clause work together. For this direction, changes in case and position can be legitimate ways of expressing the same event; exchanging the actor, recipient or obligated person is a change in content.
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