Tibetan to Belarusian: keep an owner’s reference separate from agreement with the possession
The source can distinguish someone’s own possession
Jäschke’s historical Tibetan grammar distinguishes a third-person owner referring back to the acting subject from an owner referring to someone else. It gives རང་གི་ for the subject-related own relationship. This is evidence about the older written usage he describes, not a claim that every contemporary Tibetan conversation uses one identical construction.
Marchant’s Belarusian possessive chapter presents свой for one’s own. A Tibetan clause about someone taking their own belongings therefore needs the reflexive ownership relationship considered, rather than an automatic third-person possessive chosen from an isolated his or her gloss. The intended owner is part of the clause’s reference structure.
The reflexive form still agrees with the thing possessed
The Belarusian chapter gives a declension for свой with different gender, number, and case forms, including singular nominative свой, свая, and сваё. The owner relationship remains reflexive across those forms. The changed ending belongs to agreement with the accompanying noun.
Jäschke describes Tibetan possessive pronouns as genitives of personal pronouns. A written source owner form cannot therefore select one fixed Belarusian spelling before every noun. Even after the translator has established that the possession belongs to the acting subject, the target phrase still requires the possessed noun’s grammatical features. Those are separate decisions.
A past predicate agrees with its subject, not with the owner phrase
Marchant’s past-tense chapter states that Belarusian past forms agree in gender and number rather than person. Its paradigm contrasts быў, была, было, and былі for past forms of be. In a sentence containing both an owner and an event participant, this agreement must follow the actual subject of the predicate.
A Tibetan sentence can place several noun expressions before its final predicate. Merely encountering an owner phrase nearest a verb does not establish that this owner controls the Belarusian past form. The translation must identify which person or thing the source assertion is about before selecting target agreement, while keeping any reflexive ownership relation linked to that participant.
Knowledge-source marking does not replace either agreement decision
Garfield and de Villiers analyze a spoken Tibetan evidential system that distinguishes personal knowledge, direct evidence, and indirect inference. Their account concerns the spoken system studied and should not be imposed unchanged on every historical written source. Where such marking is present, it supplies another kind of information about the assertion.
A source speaker’s personal access to an event does not establish the grammatical gender of the person who performed it or the noun denoting something owned. Conversely, a Belarusian gender ending does not tell the reader whether the speaker witnessed or inferred the event. The owner, the subject, and the evidence relationship must consequently remain distinct in translation. Preserving a Tibetan reflexive possession through the target’s appropriate form cannot by itself preserve the separate evidential stance of the predicate.
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