Lower Sorbian to Tamil: who feels, knows or benefits from an action
The person who knows can take a dative form
Harold Schiffman’s Tamil analysis gives enakku avare teriyum for knowing someone. The knower carries dative marking, while the person known carries accusative marking. The verb has neuter agreement. A Lower Sorbian reader accustomed to identifying a subject through nominative morphology must therefore avoid promoting the Tamil person known into the role of knower simply because the actual knower has a different case.
This construction is especially relevant when a source message says whether someone recognizes a person, likes something or needs something. Schiffman groups several such Tamil predicates as dative-stative verbs. He distinguishes an animate target, marked accusative, from an unmarked inanimate target. These are properties of the selected Tamil construction, not instructions to put the subject of every translated action into dative. A report of knowing and a report of performing a physical action need separate analyses.
An animate source object does not supply the Tamil ending
Stone’s explicitly Lower Sorbian example mam dobrego konja has a genitive-shaped accusative for an animate singular object. This already shows why the apparent case form must be interpreted within its source construction. In the Tamil knowing example, the accusative identifies the person known, but the corresponding morphology is not chosen by copying a Lower Sorbian adjective or noun ending.
The two constructions also put different pressures on interpretation. The Lower Sorbian horse example concerns the object of having; the Tamil example concerns a person’s knowledge of another person. Keeping an animate participant as the target is useful semantic continuity, but it does not make the two verbs interchangeable. First recover whether the source reports possession, recognition or a feeling; only then judge the target case relationship.
Hunger belongs to the experiencer, not a new recipient
Schiffman and Renganathan’s verb dictionary attests எனக்குப் பசிக்கிறது for being hungry. Its entry identifies a third-person neuter construction with a dative experiencer. Thus a Lower Sorbian speaker’s first-person report of hunger can legitimately yield a Tamil expression whose verb does not display first-person agreement. Reading the dative person as somebody receiving food would add an event that the statement itself does not assert.
Doing something for someone can carry an additional emphasis
In a separate case-system discussion, Schiffman contrasts a simple Tamil dative with its extension using aaka. His examples distinguish coming to do something from coming especially for that purpose, and an effort for someone from an especially directed effort. The distinction is approximate and context-sensitive; he explicitly cautions that a list of case suffixes with short glosses is insufficient.
For Lower Sorbian requests, this means that a Tamil expression involving a dative should not automatically be interpreted as the experiencer pattern above. A beneficiary or special purpose is another relationship. Preserve whether the source describes a feeling, identifies someone known, or asks for an effort on someone’s behalf: a shared case name does not collapse these meanings.
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