Finnish to Upper Sorbian: keeping the addressee distinct from people being discussed
Two participants can require a new grammatical choice
Finnish Universal Dependencies describes singular and plural number, together with first-, second- and third-person distinctions. A Finnish plural statement can concern exactly two people without a special dual verb category. Upper Sorbian has a dual as well as singular and plural, so a passage about a pair can require a distinction the source verb ending does not itself make.
Stone’s specifically Upper Sorbian pronoun table gives mój for first-person dual and wój for second-person dual. They are not interchangeable versions of we: the latter addresses two participants rather than including the speaker in a pair. When Finnish names two people earlier and then continues with a pronoun, recover whether the speaker belongs to that group before choosing the target form.
More number detail does not remove every ambiguity
Stone points out that second- and third-person dual finite verb forms coincide. His work example can therefore describe what you two do or what the two people under discussion do. This is a particularly useful warning when translating a Finnish instruction followed by a report about another pair.
The target may express dual number more explicitly than Finnish while still needing a pronoun or another contextual cue to distinguish address from reference. A sentence that switches from telling two colleagues what they do to describing two visitors should preserve that switch. Counting the participants correctly is only one part of keeping the communicative roles intact.
An embedded Finnish ending can reveal another actor
Kielibuusti’s lesson illustrates hankkiessasi pesukonetta as an embedded construction about when you acquire a washing machine. The personal ending identifies the actor of that acquisition. It is not merely an ownership ending attached to a thing. This gives a source-side clue when an instruction contains more than one action.
In an Upper Sorbian translation, establish separately who performs the main action and who performs the embedded one. If the Finnish passage addresses a pair but then describes somebody else acquiring equipment, an ambiguous target verb form must not erase the change of actor. Expanding the Finnish embedded construction into an explicit who-does-what relationship helps identify what the target sentence must communicate.
Respectful address is a separate issue from group size
Stone also records honorific use of Upper Sorbian wy for addressing one person or two. A plural-looking target pronoun is therefore not proof that more participants have been introduced. The relationship between writer and recipient can explain the form instead.
Keep this distinct from ordinary dual reference. A Finnish message explicitly naming two recipients establishes their number, but the appropriate target address also depends on the intended relationship. Conversely, a message for one recipient must not acquire an extra person simply because a respectful expression has plural morphology.
The Finnish possessive lesson offers another reason to read address in the whole construction: pronouns may be retained for contrast or omitted when an ending already supplies personal information. In a comparison between your equipment and ours, those ownership groups need to remain recognizable alongside the sentence’s actual addressees. An owner group and the people being addressed need not be identical.
Language references