Bulgarian to Tongan: deciding which two people “we” includes
Ние does not specify whether the listener belongs to the group
Bulgarian ние refers to a group including the speaker, but does not grammatically say whether the person listening is included. Tongan makes an inclusive versus exclusive distinction. POLLEX records independent kitaua for an inclusive pair and kimaua for an exclusive pair. The first can identify the speaker and addressee together; the second identifies the speaker with another person while excluding the addressee.
Bulgarian Ние двамата ще дойдем means “We two will come,” but leaves that membership question open without further context. The fact that двамата counts two people does not reveal which other person accompanies the speaker. A Tongan translation can therefore require information that is absent from the pronoun and numeral considered by themselves.
Two people have forms distinct from a larger group
Tongan also distinguishes dual from plural reference. MacDonald’s pronoun analysis gives reduced first-person exclusive ma for dual and mau for plural, with inclusive ta and tau. These contrasts identify both membership and number. They are not gender alternatives for a male and female speaker.
Bulgarian ние can cover two people or a much larger group, and a finite ending such as -ме does not make a dedicated dual distinction. Bulgarian can specify the number lexically with words such as двамата. Tongan incorporates a number distinction in the pronoun series itself. Losing the Bulgarian numeral during translation is consequently not necessarily losing the pair meaning, provided the selected target form really identifies two.
Short and independent pronouns have different grammatical homes
The independent forms recorded by POLLEX and the reduced forms analyzed by MacDonald cannot simply be substituted for one another in every position. The reduced pronouns have restricted placement associated with tense-aspect-mood elements or complementizers. MacDonald shows why calling them “always the second printed word” is an inadequate account.
Bulgarian short object pronouns also have placement restrictions, but they are not a model for the Tongan subject-pronoun series. Nor does Bulgarian’s ability to omit an explicit ние automatically license removing every Tongan person marker. The target construction must retain the required reference even if a longer independent pronoun is absent.
This distinction explains why a Tongan sentence can contain a short form not recognizable as the dictionary-style independent “we.” The translation has selected a grammatical form for its position, not necessarily a different group of participants. Membership, number, and syntactic position must be interpreted together.
The marks around the pronoun’s neighbors can be letters
Tongan also writes a glottal consonant with the fakauʻa and uses a macron for vowel length. Peace Corps gives anga, “behavior,” against ʻanga, “shark,” and kaka, “climb,” against kākā, “cheat.” These contrasts illustrate why small marks in a Tongan sentence cannot be dismissed as optional punctuation or visual decoration.
Bulgarian normally marks neither lexical vowel length with macrons nor a glottal consonant with this letter. A Bulgarian reader looking only for familiar pronoun and verb boundaries can therefore overlook relevant target sounds. The same care that distinguishes ma from mau must extend to the surrounding words: preserving the intended two people is only useful if the activity or description attached to them also retains its correct lexical form.
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