Fijian to Belarusian: a past event does not identify the person’s gender
What e tells you, and what it leaves open
Hong’s Fijian pronoun table gives e as a singular third-person subject and koya as the corresponding object. Both can refer to a male person, a female person or a thing. Changing from e to koya changes the participant’s grammatical role, rather than supplying the gender information that a Belarusian translation may require. A previous sentence identifying the participant therefore matters more than the appearance of either pronoun alone.
Time is a separate issue in the Fijian teaching material. Schütz and Komaitai introduce a as a past marker and contrast it with future na. Their movement examples combine those markers with yesterday or tomorrow. A sentence can consequently place somebody’s journey firmly in the past while still leaving that person’s gender unstated. Recognizing a past event does not resolve every decision needed to describe its participant in a complete written Belarusian narrative.
For an account of somebody going somewhere, Marchant’s Belarusian tables distinguish masculine ішоў, feminine ішла and plural ішлі. These are forms of ісці, to go. The singular choice is not obtained by translating Fijian e as a fixed equivalent of either he or she. It depends on who is being discussed. A known woman’s journey and a known man’s journey require different forms even when the Fijian subject pronoun remains unchanged.
Do not confuse two people with a grammatical gender
Belarusian past-tense forms distinguish gender and number, but not grammatical person. This means that changing a story from somebody else’s account to a quotation by that person does not automatically solve the gender question: a first-person past account also needs the appropriate form. When Fijian names a participant earlier and later uses a short pronoun, carry that established identity through the account rather than treating every short sentence as a new anonymous subject.
Fijian also makes number distinctions that should not disappear into this gender decision. Hong lists e rau for two third-person participants and e ratou for a small group, contrasting them with singular e. Belarusian plural past forms do not themselves reproduce that dual-versus-small-group contrast. If a report turns on whether two people travelled or a larger party travelled, an explicit description of the party may carry information that the plural verb alone cannot.
These are separate translation questions: when the journey happened, which participant made it, and how many participants the source identifies. Respectful Fijian number usage can complicate a literal headcount, so the surrounding reference must establish whether a form names a group or respectfully refers to one person. A Belarusian sentence should follow the intended participant, rather than mechanically multiplying travellers or assigning a gender merely because its past-tense grammar demands an ending.
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