Who Is Going with Whom? Case Endings Against Word Order
A translation item gives the sentence rāmeṇa saha gacchantam putraṃ paśyati mātā. Candidates must render it into Kannada or English. Candidate A writes: 'Rāma sees the mother going with the son.' Candidate B writes: 'The mother sees the son going with Rāma.' The key has B. Candidate A argues that Rāma is mentioned first and is therefore the natural subject, and that the mother is the object because she is the one seen. The teacher must decide, and must also decide how to mark a third script that reads: 'The mother sees Rāma going with the son.' The item carries three marks: one for the subject, one for the object, and one for the relation expressed by saha.
1. Resolve the syntax of the sentence using case endings and agreement.
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The subject is mātā, nominative singular, which agrees with the third-person singular verb paśyati. The object is putram, accusative singular, the thing seen. The participle gacchantam is accusative singular masculine and therefore agrees with putram: it is the son who is going. rāmeṇa is instrumental singular and is governed by saha: Rāma is the accompaniment. The sentence therefore means: 'The mother sees the son going with Rāma.' Candidate A's rendering makes Rāma the subject, but rāmeṇa is instrumental, not nominative; it also makes the mother the object, but mātā is nominative, not accusative. Two case endings rule out that reading before word order is even considered.
2. Why is Candidate A's appeal to word order not decisive in Sanskrit?
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Sanskrit is an inflectional language: the syntactic relations are carried by case endings, verbal agreement, and participial agreement, not by fixed positions. Word order is used for emphasis, topic, and style, and it can be inverted without changing the proposition. In this sentence, mātā at the end is still the subject because it is nominative and agrees with paśyati; rāmeṇa at the beginning is still instrumental because of its ending. Candidate A has transferred a subject-first habit from English or Kannada prose to a language where the ending, not the slot, does the work. A good answer should show the endings explicitly rather than merely assert the 'natural' order.
3. How would you score the third script, 'The mother sees Rāma going with the son'?
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The third script earns the subject mark only: it correctly makes the mother the seer. It loses the object mark because the thing seen in the Sanskrit is putram, not Rāma, and it loses the relation mark because rāmeṇa saha means 'with Rāma', not 'Rāma going'. The participle gacchantam agrees with putram, so 'going' cannot attach to Rāma in this sentence. The script has correctly identified the nominative subject but has reversed the two accusative/instrumental roles. Feedback should ask the candidate to draw arrows from each ending to its function: nominative to verb, accusative to participle and verb, instrumental to saha. That procedure would have prevented the reversal.