Czech to Tahitian: completed actions, shared plans and nearby places
Translate the event, not just the Czech verb prefix
Czech psát and napsat distinguish writing as an activity from a completed act of writing. Tahitian also expresses how an event unfolds, but its particles do not reproduce the Czech verb pair mechanically. The comparative study published by the Polynesian education ministry describes tē with nei or ra for an ongoing process and shows that this construction can occur in present or past contexts. A Czech past tense therefore does not automatically exclude an ongoing Tahitian construction.
The same study illustrates writing with Tē papa’i nei au i tā’u rata: the speaker is writing a letter. This is useful for interpreting Czech Psal jsem dopis when the intended focus is the activity underway. The target needs the surrounding time reference to establish whether that writing is happening now or was happening earlier; a Czech past ending alone cannot be matched to one isolated Tahitian particle.
Conversely, the study explains that ’ua can occur with a future reference when an event is treated as accomplished by that reference point. It should not simply be labelled the equivalent of Czech past tense. For Napsal jsem dopis, completion and past time both matter, but they are distinct pieces of the message that a Tahitian construction must express in context.
Czech my leaves the audience membership open
A Czech message using my or an unexpressed first-person plural subject does not grammatically settle whether the addressee belongs to that group. Tahitian distinguishes inclusive and exclusive first-person plural forms: tātou includes the listener, whereas mātou excludes the listener. Translating an invitation and translating an announcement about the sender’s team can therefore require different pronouns even when the Czech verb ending is identical.
The Tahitian curriculum also teaches dual pronouns separately from plural ones. Czech has no corresponding productive dual pronoun system: my can refer to two people or a larger group. Where the Czech text identifies a pair explicitly, the Tahitian wording should preserve that smaller group rather than assuming every Czech plural means three or more participants.
This place depends on who is near it
The curriculum distinguishes teie near the speaker, tenā near the addressee and terā at a distance. Czech tento and related demonstratives do not by themselves encode the same three-way distribution. In directions sent by message, a place near the recipient can consequently need a different Tahitian demonstrative from the place beside the person composing the message.
A length mark has a familiar job, a different shape
Czech readers already distinguish long and short vowels in spelling. Tahitian uses a macron, called tārava, for vowel length, while the ’eta marks a glottal consonant. A Czech acute accent and a Tahitian macron can both concern duration, but an apostrophe-like ’eta is a separate sound. Removing these marks would erase distinctions rather than merely simplifying the typography.
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