Tibetan to Mongolian Cyrillic: knowing the event does not make an object one’s own
Local ownership follows the subject of the clause
Gong and Despić’s Khalkha Mongolian research describes a reflexive possessive suffix conventionally represented as -AA, with its actual vowel determined by harmony. In the constructions they study, the suffix links the possession to a local subject. A Tibetan translation must therefore identify that subject before choosing reflexive ownership marking in Mongolian.
The study’s short form nom-oo, book with reflexive possessive marking, illustrates a relation that cannot be interpreted simply as somebody owns a book. The owner is constrained by the construction. Scholarly Romanisation is used here to make the relationship visible; the translated result for this language option should use Mongolian Cyrillic writing.
The recipient is not automatically the owner
The researchers illustrate a person giving a book to another person while the reflexive suffix identifies the giver as the book’s owner. A Tibetan account of transfer consequently needs to distinguish the recipient from the owner at the relevant point in the event. Giving something to somebody does not prove that the object already belongs to that recipient.
Zeisler’s Standard Spoken Tibetan account links epistemic authority with involvement or responsibility in some source constructions. Such involvement does not settle the target ownership relation. The narrator may authoritatively describe another person giving away their own book without either receiving or owning it. Preserve the giver, recipient and narrator as separate participants where the source does.
A self expression can have a different antecedent
Gong and Despić contrast subject-oriented öör-öö with an elsewhere form öör ni. Their examples show that changing the suffixal material changes the possible antecedent, not merely the emphasis of an otherwise identical expression. A Tibetan self-reference should therefore not be translated by choosing a generic Mongolian self word and ignoring its construction.
In a Tibetan account where a doctor shows another person a reflection, establish whose image is involved. The doctor performing the action and the other person viewing it are different possible referents. The target form must preserve the intended reference rather than attach it to whichever participant was mentioned last.
The suffix can also connect subjects across an embedded clause
The Khalkha study extends its analysis to certain nominalised clauses where the morphology signals a shared subject. A Tibetan passage describing what somebody did while being elsewhere therefore needs its clause participants recovered, rather than interpreting every occurrence of the Mongolian suffix as literal ownership of an object.
A source narrative can describe one person buying a book while that same person stays in a country, or describe an action during another person’s stay. Those are different temporal and participant relations. The Mongolian translation must preserve the intended subject relationship alongside the book’s ownership. Knowledge perspective, possession and shared participation interact in a narrative, but none should be used as a shortcut for identifying the others.
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