Catalan to Tongan: who belongs to we and how many people are involved?
Catalan we leaves two Tongan decisions open
Catalan nosaltres identifies a group containing the speaker, but it does not grammatically distinguish exactly two people from a larger group or explicitly mark whether the addressee belongs to that group. Tongan pronouns make these distinctions. A translation may therefore need information which the source pronoun leaves to the conversation.
Catherine Macdonald’s Tongan paradigm contrasts kitaua, inclusive dual, with kimaua, exclusive dual. Both concern two people including the speaker, but only the inclusive form includes the addressee. A Catalan message about what we will do can thus select different target pronouns depending on who is expected to participate.
The distinction matters in an invitation: a plan involving the writer and recipient differs from news about the writer and another person. The Catalan verb’s first-person plural agreement does not settle that question. Establish whether the recipient is part of the announced action before choosing a Tongan form.
A bigger group needs a new count, not a more emphatic dual
The same paradigm gives kitautolu for inclusive plural and kimautolu for exclusive plural. These are not stylistic alternatives to the duals. A Catalan source mentioning a pair earlier and later expanding the group may require a change in target number even if the source continues to use nosaltres.
The NZALT teaching vocabulary separates these postposed cardinal pronouns from preposed forms. The target should use the form appropriate to its grammatical position; recognising the participant set does not make all pronoun shapes interchangeable.
A Catalan coordination naming the speaker and one companion can establish the dual count even if the next sentence contains only a first-person plural verb. Conversely, a source that names the speaker, companion and recipient establishes a larger inclusive group. The relevant evidence can sit outside the immediately translated clause, because Catalan does not repeat a dedicated dual label.
Our agreement counts the possessions, while the owner group needs separate interpretation
The IEC explains that Catalan possessives agree with the possessed noun. A singular form accompanying one shared item does not mean there is one owner, just as a plural possessed noun does not prove a large owner group. This distinction becomes particularly useful beside Tongan’s participant-number categories.
Macdonald’s appendix presents possessive forms separately from the personal-pronoun table and distinguishes inclusive from exclusive owner groups. A Catalan source about our plans or our property should therefore not inherit its Tongan owner choice merely from the number of plans or items.
For a source describing one decision shared by the writer and recipient, the owner group can be inclusive and dual despite the decision being singular. For decisions made by the writer and colleagues excluding the recipient, the group is exclusive even if the recipient is now being informed. Read Catalan agreement as information about its own controller, then use the actual people involved to construct the Tongan reference.
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