Tibetan to Maithili: respect can affect agreement beyond the person performing the action
A shared concern with respect does not create a shared paradigm
Tibetan distinguishes ordinary, honorific and high-honorific personal references. Maithili also makes fine distinctions of person and respect, but those distinctions can affect verbal agreement as well as pronoun choice. Translating a Tibetan honorific by changing only one Maithili pronoun may therefore leave the predicate inconsistent with the intended relationship.
Kumari and Chandra’s Maithili study contrasts second-person honorific əhɑ̃ with high-honorific əpne and other address levels. These forms illustrate the target’s own system rather than providing a one-to-one chart for Tibetan categories. A Tibetan high-honorific reference must be interpreted in its social and conversational setting before the corresponding Maithili construction is selected.
The respected person may be an object rather than the subject
The Maithili research documents agreement with certain objects, including second-person and honorific third-person participants. This matters for Tibetan sentences in which the writer sees, contacts or otherwise acts toward a respected person. The source’s honorific object should not disappear from the target agreement simply because the writer is the subject.
Conversely, Tibetan egophoric marking can connect the writer to an event through receiving something from someone else. That personal connection does not identify the writer as actor. Before selecting Maithili agreement, separate the sender or performer from the recipient. A target predicate that honors the wrong participant cannot preserve the source relation, however elaborate its politeness morphology appears.
Tournadre’s example involving another person sending the speaker a letter is a useful diagnostic. The auxiliary expresses personal involvement while the event still has another sender. Maithili agreement should follow the actual target participants and their relevant features, rather than treating a Tibetan egophoric ending as a command to choose first-person subject agreement everywhere.
A possessor can influence a Maithili verb without becoming the sleeper
Kumari and Chandra’s attested hun-kər beta identifies a respected person’s son. Their sleeping examples show that a relevant possessor can contribute to agreement even though the son is the participant who sleeps. This differs from assuming that every feature represented in a predicate belongs to the action’s performer.
Tibetan also permits an egophoric copula when the speaker’s involvement is through ownership or another complement relationship. The parallel is useful, but the mechanisms differ: Tibetan involvement is not automatically Maithili possessor agreement. First determine whether the source really contains a possessive noun phrase, then build the Maithili agreement appropriate to that phrase’s role.
A Tibetan account of a respected person’s relative can contain two social relationships: respect toward the possessor and respect toward the relative. Maithili should not flatten them into one honorific label. The target study distinguishes the possessor from the possessed noun and reports different agreement behavior depending on whether the possessive expression is subject or object.
Do not enlarge an explicit Tibetan pair through a polite plural
Ray’s nominal-morphology study describes Maithili sab(h) as a general plural resource and lokain as a human plural associated with honorificity or politeness. Tibetan ང་གཉིས་ explicitly identifies two speakers. A target polite plural must still preserve that exact pair when the message assigns a shared responsibility; respect is not evidence that a larger group took part.
The same distinction protects references to objects. A Tibetan pair of books does not call for a human honorific plural simply because a respected owner is mentioned nearby. Keep the quantity and type of the counted things separate from the social standing of their owner.
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