Tibetan to Pashto: case forms change with the event construction
A direct form is not always the acting participant
Miran’s Pashto morphology study distinguishes the role of direct case in present transitive clauses from its role in past transitive clauses. A Tibetan participant phrase must consequently be interpreted through the event before the Pashto case form is selected. An unchanged dictionary form is not a reliable signal of an unchanged grammatical role across tenses.
The study illustrates direct and oblique first-person forms, conventionally Romanised za and ma. These forms must be chosen for the target construction rather than treated as interchangeable equivalents of I. A Tibetan person performing an action can require a different target case pattern when the report changes from a present event to a past transitive event.
The verb can agree with the affected participant
Miran describes object agreement in past transitive constructions, contrasting it with subject agreement in intransitive constructions and present transitives. A Tibetan translation therefore needs to retain both the actor and the affected entity before target agreement is built. Selecting the person who performed the act does not necessarily identify the participant controlling every Pashto verb form.
For a Tibetan report about someone leading several animals, distinguish the person leading from the animals led. If the target construction requires agreement with the affected group, using the actor’s singular number throughout can misrepresent the relation. The correct target form depends on the whole event configuration rather than the most prominent person in the story.
Oblique you does not always mean the same role
The Pashto study also illustrates second-person direct and oblique forms, conventionally tu and ta. An oblique pronoun can occur as an object in one construction and as the actor in another. A Tibetan source statement about who saw whom must therefore keep those roles clear independently of the target pronoun’s surface form.
Garrett and Hill’s written Tibetan analysis locates case markers at noun-phrase boundaries. Use that structure to recover the full source participant phrase, then express the intended role through the Pashto pattern required by tense and transitivity. Otherwise the translated account can reverse the observer and the observed person while still containing recognisable pronouns for both.
Modifiers belong to the same target phrase as their noun
Miran’s description also treats agreement between Pashto adjectives and nouns in number, case and gender. A Tibetan modifier needs its head noun identified before that target agreement is assembled. A source case marker following a whole phrase should not be interpreted as marking only the closest adjective.
This matters when a Tibetan account distinguishes a large group from one small participant within it. The modifier describing the group and the modifier identifying the individual cannot be distributed arbitrarily in Pashto. Resolve the source phrase boundaries and the event roles together: they determine which target noun the adjective modifies, which case the phrase needs and which participant controls the verb’s agreement in the selected construction.
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