Tibetan to Xhosa: a quoted farewell must address the person going or staying
The farewell selects a relation to the movement
The UNISA Xhosa lesson distinguishes Hamba kakuhle, go well, from Sala kakuhle, stay well. A Tibetan closing translated into Xhosa therefore needs the participants’ movements established. A general source goodbye does not by itself determine which target farewell addresses the listener in that situation.
If a Tibetan speaker is leaving a visit, the person hearing their closing may be the one remaining. If the listener is departing, the opposite movement relation applies. The target choice follows who is going and who is staying, rather than who first greeted the other person or whose home is mentioned in the narrative.
A quotation changes who counts as the speaker
Zeisler’s Standard Spoken Tibetan discussion treats reported speech in relation to the original speaker’s perspective. A Tibetan narrator quoting a farewell should consequently not be treated as the person physically departing in the quoted situation unless the source identifies them that way. The quoted speaker and the current narrator can differ.
This matters in a report such as someone telling another person goodbye before leaving. In Xhosa, the farewell must be chosen for the quoted exchange: who the original listener was and whether that listener stayed. Selecting from the narrator’s later location could reverse the movement relation and produce a farewell inappropriate to the event being described.
The listener group can require a plural closing
UNISA gives Hambani kakuhle and Salani kakuhle for addressing more than one person. A Tibetan source farewell to a group should preserve that number. Conversely, the presence of several people in the overall story does not mean that the quoted closing addresses all of them.
Garrett and Hill treat Tibetan plural material as part of noun-phrase structure in their written-corpus analysis. Recover the actual addressee phrase rather than count every person mentioned nearby. A speaker can leave a group while directing a final remark to one individual, or address several departing people while staying alone. The Xhosa closing must track that specific audience.
Respectful greeting plurality is a separate consideration
The UNISA lesson also explains that plural greeting forms can express respect toward one person. That documented greeting use should not be turned into a universal rule that every target plural farewell refers to a single respected addressee. Keep each construction’s evidence and the source participant count distinct.
A Tibetan narrative may begin with a respectful greeting and end with several people leaving. The final audience still needs to be recovered from the departure scene. Preserve the original voice, the number addressed and the direction of movement together. Those three decisions make the Xhosa farewell correspond to the source social event, rather than merely reproduce a polite-looking expression with a familiar goodbye translation.
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