Working Paper on Irrealis, Imperative Mode and Complementation ...

kunang kita ike gumantya prabhu / prabhāwa ni guṇanta śuddhânulus.
He is gone, not to be mourned o’erlong,
For he died a great hero on the battlefield,
And now you shall succeed him as king,
The might of your abilities, most pure, has reached perfection.
Discussion:
k-in-ingking-ӗn UV2-long for-IRR “(Rāvaṇa) should not be longed for [future]”
We should note here that the final –t of tamat is a 2nd person formative that replaces the
usual final –n of a negative morpheme, in this case taman. See also the discussion of tak
langghanā under OJR 11.32 above. The interpretation of tamat kingkingӗn should then be:
“not-you should-(for him) pine”, and an appropriate translation might be: “you should not
pine (overlong) for him.”
g-um-anty-a AV1-replace, succeed-IRR “(you) shall succeed (as king)”
For comparative purposes I include a Balinese mabasan gloss for this verse. Balinese appears
never to have had a marked realis-irrealis distinction in its syntactic repertoire. In any case,
this distinction is not present in modern Balinese, although it is present in modern Javanese.
Even so, Balinese participants in mabasan translation sessions consistently demonstrate their
awareness of the realis-irrealis distinction in OJ and hence use modals, adverbials and similar
lexical strategies to convey the distinctions signalled in OJ through irrealis marking. There
are some interesting observations that can be drawn from the mabasan translation of OJR
24.45
In translating tamatan kingkingӗn the Balinese translators uses an unmarked verbal base
liwat, “pass by” (plus LV suffix). Since MB uses the unmarked base for UV forms this
phrase can be roughly translated “be-passed-by”, which takes sungkan adine, “(the)
pain/sickness (of) little brother/you” as its complement. An English translation will
require conversion to an active voice clause “you should let your pain pass by”.
The translator uses the future modality marker bakal, “will, shall” to translate the irrealis
mode of gumantya. It is interesting that the translator choses to convert the AV1 form of
the original (gumantya, “you will replace”) with a 1st person UV form in the Balinese:
(bakal) adӗgan-beli ratu, “(will) raise up-I (as) king”, that is “I will raise you up as king”.
Balinese mabasan version:
Mawinan buka jani liwatan, liwatan to sungkan adine /1/
Sӗwireh, sing je nyandang, adi bakal sangӗt nyӗbӗetang to sedan rakan
adine /2/
T. Hunter, ISLOJ <strong>Working</strong> <strong>Paper</strong>, 29 May 09, page 16