Tibetan to Lithuanian: personal experience is not the same as an indirect report
Two languages can mark knowledge without marking it identically
Spoken Tibetan egophoric auxiliaries relate a statement to the speaker’s personal knowledge, intention or involvement. Lithuanian has participial constructions expressing information as reported, inferred or otherwise indirectly presented. These grammatical resources invite comparison, but translating every Tibetan personal auxiliary with a Lithuanian indirect form would confuse two different relationships to the evidence.
The Lithuanian Grammar contrasts brolis dirba, brother works, with brolis dirbąs, brother is said to work. The second formulation changes how the information is presented. Tournadre’s Tibetan letter example, by contrast, involves the speaker personally receiving correspondence. A report of that direct involvement should not acquire a hearsay interpretation merely because Lithuanian offers a specialized participial form.
The useful question is what the Tibetan writer claims access to. Someone may report a relative’s occupation from another source, describe an action they personally experienced, or announce their own intention. Lithuanian can distinguish these stances, but the presence of a Tibetan auxiliary alone does not license selecting the same target stance for all three.
An evidential construction can change case without changing the actor
The Lithuanian Grammar describes an evidential passive using a neuter passive participle with an agentive genitive. It can convey an action inferred from consequences, assumed or learned through hearsay. This genitive should not be mistaken for ordinary possession simply because Tibetan also has a genitive particle used in noun complementation.
For a Tibetan report about a person’s departure, decide first whether the writer witnessed it, learned about it or inferred it from the person’s absence. If an appropriate Lithuanian evidential construction is selected, its case pattern belongs to that target construction. It does not mean the departing person now owns the event or that the Tibetan source contained a possessive relation.
This also guards against the opposite error. Tibetan agentive marking identifies an actor in documented transitive examples, but Lithuanian evidential genitive is not a mechanical replacement for it. The target construction must preserve who acted and how the information is presented, rather than matching one visibly marked source noun with another visibly inflected target noun.
A personal participant need not become a nominative subject
Lithuanian can express a personal state through a non-nominative participant. The grammar illustrates man trūksta duonos, I am short of bread, with dative man. In Tibetan, personal involvement may likewise be associated with a receiver or owner rather than the action’s performer. These parallels make participant analysis more important, not less: the two languages still select their own constructions.
A Tibetan egophoric letter statement must therefore retain the other person as sender and the speaker as recipient. Inserting Lithuanian nominative aš as the sender would reverse the transfer. Whether the target uses an ordinary receiving verb or a different construction, the first-person relationship should remain receipt rather than action performed by the writer.
Finally, Tournadre distinguishes Tibetan future intention from an assertive future statement. The Lithuanian indirect example Jis eisiąs is glossed he will probably go. That third-person mediated or qualified prediction is not a ready-made equivalent of a Tibetan first-person undertaking. Keep intention, person and information source separate when selecting the Lithuanian predicate.
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