Tibetan to Chhattisgarhi: respectful reference is more than a plural-looking pronoun
Separate the person addressed from the person honored
Jäschke’s historical Tibetan grammar distinguishes respectful pronouns of address from respectful reference to someone being discussed. It also records special vocabulary for an honored person’s body, possessions, and actions. These observations belong to the written and regional varieties he describes; they are not a promise that every contemporary Tibetan conversation uses exactly the same inventory.
For Chhattisgarhi, Vinod Kumar Verma’s pronoun lesson contrasts तैं with respectful आप and illustrates the latter in आप मन खाना खा लेवव, an invitation to eat. A Tibetan respectful expression therefore calls for a decision about the relationship between participants. Merely counting visible plural-looking pieces cannot establish whether the original addresses several people or one respected person.
A respectful verb may leave the participant unnamed
Among Jäschke’s examples, བཞུགས་པ་ contrasts with an ordinary verb of sitting, and མཛད་པ་ with an ordinary verb of doing or making. The lexical choice contributes social information even without a separate title. Translating only the action’s dictionary meaning can flatten that distinction before a Chhattisgarhi pronoun is ever chosen.
Verma’s lesson gives तैं खाना खा ले as the familiar counterpart to the respectful eating invitation. These examples demonstrate that the target contrast extends beyond substituting आप for तैं: the instruction’s wording changes too. A Tibetan honorific action concerning a third person, however, should not be turned into a respectful second-person command. First establish who acts and who is addressed.
A third-person singing example need not choose he or she
Verma supplies ओह गाना गावत हे for both masculine and feminine Hindi descriptions of someone singing. The Chhattisgarhi sentence does not require the translator to select two different forms simply to reproduce that Hindi distinction. An English intermediary that inserts he or she can therefore introduce an unnecessary choice before the target is written.
The same author’s gender discussion includes संगी, companion, among words usable for either sex. This is useful when interpreting a Tibetan social relationship whose wording does not establish a gender-specific target noun. It does not mean that every Chhattisgarhi noun is neutral, or that a clearly identified person’s gender should be erased. The available target expression must be considered individually.
Respect and knowledge remain independent dimensions
Garfield and de Villiers’s spoken Tibetan analysis distinguishes personal epistemic access from direct and indirect evidence. Those distinctions concern how a claim is known. A respectful pronoun in the Chhattisgarhi translation does not express whether the speaker observed the action, inferred it, or knew it through personal involvement.
A sentence about an honored person can consequently require both respectful reference and a separate indication of the source’s knowledge basis. Neither choice follows automatically from the other. In particular, an inference concerning a respected person must not become eyewitness testimony merely because the target sounds deferential; and preserving an evidential explanation does not recover respect lost by selecting the familiar instruction illustrated above.
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