Tibetan to Bulgarian: two evidential systems do not provide a one-to-one code
Identify the source of knowledge before selecting a target form
Garfield and de Villiers analyze a spoken Tibetan system distinguishing immediate personal knowledge, direct perception, and indirect inference. Within their analysis, two indirect forms distinguish a conclusion from a specific perceptible clue from one based on more general information. This is a description of the system studied, rather than a uniform rule for every Tibetic variety.
Krasimira Aleksova’s Bulgarian study argues for four evidential categories: indicative, conclusive, renarrative, and dubitative. She also acknowledges competing analyses in the literature. The existence of grammatical evidence distinctions in both languages therefore does not justify pairing their category labels mechanically. The source may make a distinction that the chosen Bulgarian form organizes differently.
Reported information and a conclusion are different starting points
Aleksova describes renarrative forms as conveying somebody else’s information, while her conclusive category expresses a speaker’s inference or generalization. A Tibetan statement inferred from visible consequences should not automatically become a Bulgarian report attributed to another speaker.
Conversely, a Tibetan message passing on someone’s words should not silently become the translator’s own conclusion. The practical issue is whether the source names or implies an informant, a perceptible clue, or background knowledge. Establishing that relationship gives the target evidential choice an actual interpretation, rather than treating every indirectly known event as the same kind of report.
A Bulgarian surface form can have more than one analysis
Temnikova and colleagues’ study of automatic renarrative detection notes overlap between Bulgarian evidential and tense forms. Their examples include носил съм and third-person носил without the auxiliary. They explain why context and interpretation are needed and why their detection work focuses on forms that are easier to recognize.
Thus a Tibetan-to-Bulgarian result containing a participial form cannot be judged as a faithful evidential transfer from that spelling alone. Participant person, the presence of an auxiliary, time reference, and the surrounding discourse can affect its analysis. The target’s compact morphology is not a transparent label corresponding to a single source auxiliary.
An evidential is not a factual accuracy certificate
Bettina Zeisler’s idealized Standard Spoken Tibetan comparison uses labels including factual and egophoric, while explaining the latter through epistemic authority, familiarity, involvement, or responsibility. Those labels describe linguistic presentation; factual does not mean an external verifier has certified the proposition.
Temnikova and colleagues similarly caution against using the presence of Bulgarian renarrative as the sole sign of untrustworthiness. For this translation direction, neither replacing every Tibetan inference with doubt nor replacing every factual-labeled source form with an unqualified guarantee preserves the message. The source assertion and the speaker’s route to it must remain distinguishable. Bulgarian can signal reporting, inference, or doubt through its own resources, but the choice should follow what the actual Tibetan text expresses rather than an assumed ranking from true to false.
Language references