Tibetan to Telugu: respectful reference can also distinguish near and remote
The same social respect can apply to different referents
Vemuri’s Telugu pronoun description distinguishes proximal and remote third-person series. Its respectful pair vI-ru and vA-ru can refer to a respected person presented as near or remote. Scholarly Romanisation is used here because the grammatical contrast concerns the series rather than an English he–she distinction.
Garrett and Hill identify Tibetan demonstratives ḥdi and de in their written-corpus analysis. A Tibetan reference contrasting people should preserve which person each expression indicates before the Telugu social form is chosen. Selecting a respectful pronoun alone does not retain the difference between this person and that person.
Respectful singular and neutral plural can share a form
Vemuri lists vA-ru both for respectful singular reference and for neutral plural reference. A Tibetan account therefore needs the actual number of people established separately. A target form’s plural use should not make a respected individual become an entire group.
This is particularly relevant when a Tibetan passage introduces an official and then discusses the official’s colleagues. The first referent can remain one person while the second is plural. Follow the source grouping and any explicit count rather than choose a new participant count from the surface appearance of the Telugu pronoun.
A thing requires its own demonstrative reference
The Telugu description distinguishes i-di and a-di in the demonstrative system. When a Tibetan passage shifts from pointing to a person to pointing to an object, the target must track the intended entity rather than continue a person-reference form automatically. The distance relation and the kind of referent both matter.
In an account where one respected person gives an object to another, there can be three simultaneous referents. The person near the speaker, the person farther away and the object transferred should not be merged by repeated generic target words. Source phrase boundaries help establish which expression describes each participant and which one identifies the object.
Personal authority does not imply physical proximity
Zeisler links egophoric choices in Standard Spoken Tibetan with personal authority, responsibility or acquaintance. None of those source relationships proves that the person mentioned is physically near the speaker. A Tibetan narrator can know a distant person well or only newly observe somebody nearby.
The Telugu translator must therefore separate the epistemic relation from the demonstrative choice. Do not convert an authoritative Tibetan statement into proximal reference merely because the speaker is personally involved. Similarly, a distant target series should not imply that the speaker lacks reliable knowledge. Preserve who is referred to, how respectfully they are presented, whether they are one person or several, and what the source claims about the basis of the statement as distinct parts of the translation.
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