Assamese to Māori: specifying who is included in a shared plan
Decide whether the listener is taking part
Māori distinguishes a group that includes the listener from one that excludes them. For exactly two people, tāua includes the listener and māua excludes them. For three or more, tātou includes the listener and mātou excludes them. A translation of an Assamese plan needs the actual participants, not just an isolated equivalent of a first-person plural pronoun.
Consider an update to a host about visitors arriving together. If the host is not travelling, the visitors’ “we” should not silently include the host in the journey. If the sentence instead proposes that everyone walk to the venue together, the listener’s participation changes. Keep those two events separate in the source.
Count the audience separately from the travelling party
Māori distinguishes one, two, and three-or-more people in its pronoun system. Kōrua addresses two people, while koutou addresses at least three. The relevant count is the people addressed by that part of the message, not everyone mentioned in the paragraph.
A message sent to two hosts may describe four visitors. The greeting addresses the hosts, while a later first-person statement describes the visitors. Do not use one headcount for both. If an email is sent to only one representative, clarify whether your wording addresses that person individually or their whole team.
Assamese honorificity and number are separate grammatical features. Respectful source wording cannot, on its own, settle the Māori participant count. Preserve the courtesy of the invitation while identifying the people involved explicitly.
Possession is another relationship to establish
Māori possessive categories depend on the relationship between the possessor and what is possessed. They are not simply masculine and feminine endings. Transport and shelter, for example, occur among the o-category relationships in the Kupu explanation.
For a shared travel plan, specify whether “our vehicle” means the visitors’ transport or transport shared with the hosts. Naming the owner and naming the people travelling answer different questions. A vehicle owned by one organization can carry people from several groups.
Translate the full possessive phrase in its sentence rather than attaching a remembered form of “our” to every noun. If the source changes from a vehicle to equipment brought for an event, the relationship may require another target construction even though the participants remain identical.
Preserve the decisions when the plan changes
Suppose a two-person visit becomes a three-person visit, or a host joins the travellers. Translate the updated plan as a whole. Both the number distinction and listener inclusion may change, even if the destination and time remain the same. Editing only the numeral in the earlier translation is insufficient.
Send a confirmation that lists the travelling party, the hosts, the meeting point, and who provides transport. Keep names and booking references in their established spellings. This lets each recipient check the plan against their own role instead of interpreting an unexplained “we.”
Save the confirmed message with the participant list. On reuse, check inclusion as well as headcount: two people in a new exchange do not necessarily take the same pronoun as two people in the previous one.
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