Spanish to Central Kurdish: a past verb ending can identify the person informed
Me informó and lo informé reverse who does what
Spanish Me informó says that somebody informed the speaker. Lo informé says that the speaker informed him. The object clitic and the finite verb ending cooperate to identify the participants: me identifies the person receiving the information in the first sentence, whereas the ending of informé identifies the speaker as the agent in the second.
Central Kurdish, or Sorani, can distribute those roles differently in past transitive constructions. Wheeler M. Thackston gives âgây kirdim for he informed me. In that example, the final -im corresponds to the person informed, while the agent is expressed by the preceding agent affix. Reading the last ending as though it were Spanish first-person subject agreement would reverse the message.
The same-looking small form is not always a possessive
Thackston explains that the agent affixes of these past constructions have the same forms as enclitic possessive pronouns. Their position and function in the sentence matter. The presence of such an affix does not mean that a Spanish clause reporting an action must acquire an ownership meaning in translation.
Consider a Spanish account of a schedule change. Me informó ayer identifies the speaker as the person who received the notice; Lo informé ayer identifies the speaker as the one who gave it. A reversal could assign responsibility for notifying a colleague to the wrong person. Keeping the past time correct would not compensate for changing the notifier into the recipient.
Spanish can leave the subject unspoken because its finite verb supplies person information. A Sorani translation need not add a separate independent word for every Spanish implicit subject, but it must express the corresponding agent appropriately. Conversely, a final Sorani personal element should not automatically be treated as a second agent simply because Spanish often marks the subject at the end of its verb.
Negation makes position an especially unreliable shortcut
The same grammar gives námdît for I did not see him, her, or it, and námdîtî(t) for I did not see you. The examples show an agent element associated with the negative prefix and a possible ending identifying the object. The object contrast is not located where a Spanish reader expects the separate clitics lo, la, or te.
In Spanish No te vi, the te points to the person not seen and vi points to the speaker who failed to see them. The Sorani construction needs to preserve those roles even though its personal material is arranged differently. It must not become “you did not see me” simply because a first-person element appears before the lexical verb.
This explanation concerns the past transitive patterns described by Thackston, not every Sorani verb in every tense. It also does not turn an ordinary report into a passive: the grammar explicitly distinguishes these constructions from Sorani passives. For an information exchange, identify the notifier and the person informed first, then interpret each affix within the actual Sorani construction rather than through Spanish word position.
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