Fijian to Assamese: respectful reference can change more than a pronoun
Separate respectful number from the number of people
Joseph Hong’s Fijian survey documents uses of dual, limited-group, and plural pronoun forms in addressing or referring respectfully to individuals. A form associated with several people consequently does not always announce several participants. Before translating a family message into Assamese, establish whether a reference concerns one respected person or an actual group. Otherwise, the target can change the family relationship simply by counting a respectful form literally.
Hong also distinguishes the limited-group category traditionally called trial from an exact three-person count. That matters when a message moves between reference to an individual relative and reference to the relatives accompanying them. Neither respectful number nor the trial label independently establishes the size of the accompanying party. The Fijian choices supply social and numerical information whose intended interpretation must be recovered together.
A directly suffixed Fijian relative is not an ordinary owned object
Ruqan Wang’s Fijian analysis contrasts possession involving kinship or body parts with possession expressed through classifiers. Its kinship illustration na tama-i Jone identifies John’s father through a direct linking pattern. By contrast, an ownership classifier occurs in an expression for fish that John owns. The structural difference concerns the relationship, not a change in John’s identity. A father reference should not be interpreted as property ownership merely because both expressions can be paraphrased with an English possessive.
This gives a useful starting point for Assamese: identify the possessor and the kinship relationship before selecting the target’s noun form. The Fijian linker is not itself an Assamese level-of-respect marker. Its presence does not automatically determine whether John is addressed familiarly or formally in the surrounding message. A construction that successfully identifies the relative still leaves the target’s social-reference choices to be resolved.
Assamese can mark the relationship to the addressee on the kinship noun
Samhita Bharadwaj’s field-based study gives tomar deutara and aponar deutak as neutral and formal expressions for your father. Her analysis connects the different suffixes with the possessor’s person and the relevant honorific distinction. Thus changing the Assamese address form can affect the kinship expression too; replacing only a standalone pronoun may leave the phrase mismatched. The father remains the same relationship while the treatment of the addressee changes.
The study also contrasts neutral and formal second-person command patterns, while reporting that the corresponding singular and plural subjects share the relevant verbal honorific agreement. Assamese therefore does not simply reproduce Fijian respectful number through an identical numerical change on every verb. For a request about the addressee’s father, distinguish the person receiving the request from the relative being discussed, then keep the selected address level consistent with the attested kinship construction. These observations follow the study’s standard Assamese data elicited in Sivasagar district, rather than asserting identical choices for every regional variety.
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