Tibetan to Estonian: personal knowledge is not automatically reported speech
Do not turn involvement into hearsay
Spoken Tibetan egophoric auxiliaries can present an event through the speaker’s personal involvement, knowledge or intention. Estonian has a grammatical quotative, commonly associated with information heard from another person. Both concern the relationship between a statement and its source, but they do not express the same relationship. Translating Tibetan personal involvement by mechanically adding Estonian -vat can therefore reverse how the writer knows something.
The Estonian handbook illustrates its quotative with Jüri olevat endale uue maja ostnud: Jüri is reported to have bought himself a new house. The construction presents mediated information. Tournadre’s Tibetan examples include a speaker directly receiving a letter and using an egophoric auxiliary. Receiving the letter personally is not the same as hearing a report about it; the Estonian quotative would require an independent reason in that context.
A useful distinction is between the event’s participants and the information’s transmission. Someone else can perform an action that personally involves the Tibetan speaker. Conversely, a first-person event can be recounted through someone else’s report in an appropriate context. Neither the Tibetan pronoun nor the Estonian person ending alone establishes the evidential relationship. Read the source auxiliary together with the participants before deciding whether Estonian mediated-speech marking belongs there.
An omitted Tibetan I may reappear in a declined Estonian form
Tournadre notes that Tibetan first-person reference may be omitted in examples where an egophoric auxiliary already makes it clear. Estonian then needs the form appropriate to the recovered role. EKI distinguishes mina or ma as nominative I, minu or mu in the genitive, and minule or mulle in the allative. These forms are not interchangeable decorations around the same English gloss.
For the Tibetan letter-receiving example, recovering the speaker does not justify inserting nominative mina as sender. A target recipient construction may instead require a form such as mulle. In the Tibetan ownership example this key is mine, the relationship is possession, so the Estonian resources for ownership become relevant instead. The source auxiliary helps recover involvement; the target sentence decides its case realization.
A pair must remain a pair after the pronoun changes
Tibetan ང་གཉིས་ explicitly means we two. EKI’s Estonian pronoun paradigm gives meie or me as plural we, without making that pronoun itself a dedicated dual. If the Tibetan writer specifies two people sharing an obligation, an Estonian plural alone can leave the commitment’s participants less precise. Keep the pair restriction in the translated expression when it carries that responsibility.
The same issue arises with Tibetan ཁོ་གཉིས་, they two, and Estonian nemad or nad. Exact quantity is independent of whether a later statement is firsthand or reported. Two people may be discussed in a quotative report, or described through the speaker’s direct involvement; preserving two must not be used as a substitute for deciding the evidential force. The pair and the source of knowledge answer different questions in this translation.
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