Persian to Filipino: who belongs to we, and who performed the action?
Persian we does not identify the listener’s membership
Roberts’s Persian Grammar Sketch lists mā as the first-person plural pronoun. It identifies a group containing the speaker, but the pronoun itself does not provide a separate inclusive-versus-exclusive form telling the translator whether the listener belongs to that group. The surrounding exchange must supply that distinction before a Filipino rendering can make it explicit.
This is especially consequential in a Persian message about a shared home, purchase or plan. A speaker may mean the speaker and the listener, or the speaker and other people while addressing an outsider. Both involve we, yet they distribute participation differently. Establish whether the listener owns the item jointly, helped perform the action or is merely receiving information about somebody else’s group. Those relationships do not necessarily coincide. Being invited to hear about a plan does not automatically make the listener one of its participants, and being included in a future visit does not necessarily imply ownership of the place visited.
Filipino possessive forms make the group distinction explicit
Northern Illinois University’s Tagalog teaching grammar distinguishes namin, our excluding the listener, from natin, our including the listener. Its possessive pattern places the pronoun after the possessed noun. For a Persian phrase naming our house, the choice is therefore not complete after recognizing the first-person plural owner: decide whether the addressee belongs among those owners.
The same pronoun set can also express an actor in a verbal construction. The university example Nilinis namin ang bahay kahapon describes the group cleaning the house yesterday. Namin there identifies who cleaned; it does not state that the house belongs to them. This provides a practical warning for Persian-to-Filipino accounts of household tasks. Keep participation in the work separate from ownership of the building. A possessive interpretation cannot be selected merely because the same target pronoun is glossed our in a vocabulary list. Its grammatical relationship depends on the surrounding construction.
The target verb determines how an actor is expressed
Kroeger’s primary analysis illustrates Bumili ako ng gatas, I bought some milk, alongside a buying construction using ko for the speaker. These forms do not describe different speakers: the voice construction changes how the participant is grammatically expressed. The study argues for distinguishing syntactic relationships from semantic actorhood rather than identifying every actor with one invariant pronoun form.
For a Persian purchase message, first retain who bought what, then build the Filipino verb and participant forms together. Do not choose ako or ko solely from the English gloss I or my. A Persian verb ending may already identify the buyer without an independent pronoun, while the target sentence organizes that same actor within its own construction. This is separate from the inclusive-versus-exclusive decision for a group. Preserve both when relevant: whether the listener belongs to the buying group, and how that group is expressed with the chosen Filipino verb.
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