Tibetan to Sinhala: knowing an action personally does not establish control over it
Epistemic involvement and voluntary action are different properties
Zeisler discusses personal epistemic authority in an idealized Standard Spoken Tibetan system. Familiarity, involvement, or responsibility can contribute to that authority. This concerns the speaker’s relation to the information, rather than a general label meaning that every described action was performed voluntarily.
Carmen Jany’s study of spoken Sinhala instead examines how volitivity, animacy, and participant roles affect case and verb selection. A Tibetan statement grounded in personal experience still needs its event interpreted before the Sinhala volitive or involitive construction is chosen. Personally knowing that one fell does not make the fall intentional.
The Sinhala first-person form can change with the construction
Jany contrasts mamə diuw-a, I ran, with maawə wæṭe-nəwa, I am falling involuntarily, in the study’s transcription. The participant remains a single speaker, but the target case form and predicate differ. These are not alternative spellings selected solely by personal preference.
Jäschke’s historical Tibetan grammar gives ང་ as a common first-person reference. Recognizing that source pronoun identifies the speaker; it does not select one Sinhala form for every event involving that speaker. The target must also express whether the person acts as a controller, experiences a state, or undergoes an affected event.
A case label cannot be copied independently of the verb
Jany emphasizes that Sinhala case marking does not correspond one for one to grammatical roles. The paper also cautions that the correlation between involitive forms and absence of volition is not perfectly uniform. A translator cannot choose an arbitrary involitive-looking verb merely because the source describes an accident.
Jäschke describes historical Tibetan particles for agent and instrument marking. Their presence can help interpret source roles, but it does not supply a Sinhala case-ending substitution table. Establish the intended event and use the target construction appropriate to its actual lexical predicate. An apparent agent in the source and a nominative form in the target are not universally equivalent categories.
A direct perception report is not a volitive predicate
Garfield and de Villiers analyze Tibetan distinctions between direct evidence and inference, among other kinds of knowledge. A person can directly perceive an uncontrolled action, or infer a deliberate action from its results. The evidence distinction therefore cuts across the control distinction examined in the Sinhala study.
Tibetan-to-Sinhala translation must preserve both when they are consequential. A target sentence with appropriate involitive morphology can still misrepresent the source if it turns an inferred event into something personally witnessed. Conversely, an explanation about direct observation cannot repair a target predicate that makes an accidental event sound deliberate. Identify who is affected, what control they have, and how the claim became known before treating a polished first-person target clause as faithful to the source.
Language references