Estonian to Samoan: distinguish a negative update from a prohibition
Ei tule and ära tule do different jobs
The EKI verb tables distinguish Estonian ei tule, a negative indicative form, from ära tule, a negative command. A message reporting that somebody is not coming and a message telling somebody not to come can therefore share the same lexical verb while performing different actions. This distinction must survive in Samoan; finding a negative word in the result is only the beginning of the check.
The tables also distinguish ei tulnud from ei ole tulnud and ei olnud tulnud. These forms place the denied arrival within different temporal constructions. For a Samoan arrival update, establish whether the source reports a past non-arrival, describes the situation up to now, or looks back from another past point. Do not turn every negative arrival report into a prohibition. Equally, an Estonian instruction introduced by ära should not become a neutral observation that the recipient has not arrived. The difference affects whether the reader is being informed or asked to act.
Samoan distinguishes ordinary negation and not yet
Mosel and So’o’s Say it in Samoan contrasts lē with le‘i and introduces the latter through an arrival exchange: E le‘i sau, the person has not come yet. This is useful when an Estonian update leaves the expected visitor outstanding. The target construction can encode a temporal relationship that an English word-by-word gloss simply calling it “not” would obscure.
The same book separately teaches prohibitions with ‘aua, including ‘Aua le nofo i lalo!, telling somebody not to sit down. A Samoan prohibition is thus not obtained merely by borrowing the negative arrival pattern. When Estonian wording denies an event, retain its status as an update; when it prohibits an action, retain its directive function. The book supplies several prohibition constructions, so this example should not be treated as an instruction to put an identical particle sequence before every verb. Person and the chosen construction still matter.
The negative need not occupy the Estonian position
John Middleton’s analysis describes Samoan preverbal pronouns before negation, with tense or aspect material preceding both. Its attested example Ua ‘ou lē vaai ia Olioli says that the speaker has not seen Olioli. The negative belongs within the construction rather than needing to appear immediately beside an Estonian-style subject at the start of the sentence.
For an Estonian message with a named person and a negative report, this gives a concrete reading check: distinguish the pronoun representing the speaker from the person named after the seeing predicate. Moving words around until their positions resemble the source can reverse that relationship or disrupt the target order. Middleton compares Samoan with Tokelauan, whose ordering differs; the relevant pattern here is explicitly the Samoan one. His structural account is used to explain the documented word order, not to claim that every negative sentence must contain a separate preverbal pronoun.
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