Tibetan to Lingala: distinguish writing something from writing for somebody
An added participant can change the Lingala verb
Bokamba’s comparative study contrasts ko-kom-a, to write, with ko-kom-el-a, to write for someone. The added material in the latter belongs to the target verb’s construction. It is not simply another independent pronoun naming a person.
Jäschke’s historical Tibetan grammar records expressions meaning for someone’s sake or on someone’s behalf, including a genitive combined with a following relational expression. A source phrase of that kind must be interpreted as a relationship to the action. In Lingala, the target predicate may express that relationship through its own morphology rather than reproduce the Tibetan phrase word by word.
The beneficiary is not necessarily the recipient of the finished text
The distinction between writing for someone and writing something can matter even when the same letter and people are mentioned. A Tibetan writer may prepare a text on another person’s behalf without sending it to that person. Translating the beneficiary as the addressee would change the arrangement.
Bokamba also contrasts a writer noun with a derived noun describing someone who writes for others. Thus the person receiving assistance need not become the person doing the writing. When the Tibetan expression mentions both a helper and the person helped, retain their separate roles through the selected Lingala construction. The presence of a person beside a writing predicate is not enough to decide which role they fill.
Source number may be implicit while target actor marking remains explicit
Jäschke notes that Tibetan plural marking can be omitted where circumstances make number clear. A source description of writing on behalf of several people therefore cannot be treated as singular solely because a visible plural sign is absent. Equally, several beneficiaries do not make the writer a group.
Bokamba’s Lingala personal paradigm distinguishes an individual speaker from several speakers through the verb’s initial agreement material. This target distinction concerns the actors. The number of people benefiting from their writing is another property of the event. Conflating those quantities could make a single helper appear to be a committee, or reduce a collective authorship to one individual.
A relationship marker is not a statement of evidence
Garfield and de Villiers describe spoken Tibetan evidential distinctions concerning personal knowledge, direct access, and inference. A speaker personally involved in writing may use grammar reflecting that knowledge relationship. That does not by itself identify the person on whose behalf the text is prepared.
The Lingala benefactive writing construction answers who benefits from the action. It cannot stand in for the Tibetan speaker’s basis for asserting that the writing happened. Keep these roles apart when a Tibetan message reports someone else’s work: the writer, beneficiary, intended reader, and source of information can all be different. Rebuilding the verb faithfully preserves the assistance relationship, while any consequential evidential meaning requires its own expression rather than being assigned to the person who happens to benefit.
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