Tibetan to Welsh: identify what the copula is doing before translating yn
An identity statement carries more than a dictionary be
In Zeisler’s idealised account of Standard Spoken Tibetan, copular choices can reflect a speaker’s authority over a claim. Those source distinctions must be interpreted before a Welsh identity sentence is built. A target construction identifying somebody as a teacher does not automatically express how the speaker knows that identity.
The Welsh language documentation illustrates Mae Siôn yn athro, identifying Siôn as a teacher. This supplies a target predicate construction, not a substitute for every epistemic distinction associated with Tibetan yin or red. If the source contrasts intimate knowledge with an inference about somebody’s role, preserve that contrast where relevant through the surrounding Welsh wording instead of assuming the copula alone carries it.
Predicative yn is not the same as every other yn
The Welsh documentation distinguishes predicative yn before nouns or adjectives from the imperfective marker of the same written shape and from the preposition yn. It associates these uses with different mutation behaviour. A Tibetan source element cannot therefore be assigned a single Welsh equivalent solely because one previous example contained yn.
The example Roedd Nia yn gyflym describes Nia as fast. Translating a Tibetan description of a person’s quality is a different grammatical task from locating that person somewhere or presenting an activity in progress. The target sequence must reflect the kind of predicate being expressed, even if several candidate Welsh constructions contain an identical-looking short word.
A relation to a person can be carried by a preposition
Welsh also has inflected prepositions. The documentation’s gwrando arni means listening to her, with the relevant personal reference inside arni. A Tibetan passage referring to the person listened to must retain that relation rather than promote the person to the listener merely because a separate target pronoun is not visibly present.
This matters in a report containing both a person speaking and another person attending to the speech. Keep the source of the utterance, the listener and the person later described by an identity predicate separate. Target word segmentation is not a reliable guide to how many participants are involved or which participant occupies each role.
A reported voice must remain distinct from the narrator
Zeisler describes the Tibetan perspective system as centring on the speaker in statements and the addressee in information-seeking questions. That distinction is relevant when a Tibetan dialogue is translated into Welsh: the narrator’s knowledge should not silently replace the perspective of the person asking or answering.
A question about somebody’s occupation and the reply identifying that occupation belong to different turns. The Welsh identity construction can express the reply, but it does not license adding certainty to an uncertain source question. Likewise, an inflected preposition referring to somebody in the dialogue must continue pointing to that person after the voice changes. Preserve who is claiming, asking and being referred to alongside the target predicate structure.
Language references