Greek to Lower Sorbian: plural wording does not settle whether two people are involved
Count participants rather than copying the source number label
Modern Greek distinguishes singular and plural forms, whereas Lower Sorbian also has a grammatical dual. A Greek plural reference can therefore require a target decision that the source ending alone does not resolve: does the group consist of exactly two, or more than two? A translation of a shared plan should identify the actual membership before selecting a Lower Sorbian pronoun or agreement form. Otherwise the target may add or remove a participant while retaining a superficially plausible we.
Stone’s Lower Sorbian paradigm distinguishes mej, first-person dual, from my, first-person plural. The contrast is relevant to who joins the writer in an action. A source passage explicitly describing the writer and one companion supplies stronger evidence for a dual interpretation than a bare Greek plural verb does. Conversely, a broad institutional we should not become a two-person team merely because only one other individual was named recently.
Polite address is not an instruction to invent a group
Greek second-person plural forms can address one person politely. Politis’s discussion of the politeness plural illustrates how grammatical number and the number of listeners diverge. When such a message becomes Lower Sorbian, the translator must preserve the single addressee rather than infer multiple people solely from the Greek verb ending. The social relationship contributes to the form without changing how many people receive the message.
Lower Sorbian also allows wy as honorific address to one person, or to two. That apparent similarity is useful, but does not make every Greek plural reference honorific or every target wy numerically plural. Establish whether the Greek passage addresses a group, respectfully addresses an individual, or shifts between those situations. The same source form can require different interpretations in different parts of a conversation.
With father can be included in the pair or added to it
Stone records a further Lower Sorbian complication: first- and second-person comitative expressions such as mej z nanom may refer to two or three people in total, depending on context. Father can belong within the pair already represented by the pronoun, or be added to an existing pair. The construction does not by itself provide a safe arithmetic formula for translating a Greek speaker-and-companion expression.
The corresponding third-person pattern wonej z nanom refers to three: the two people plus father. This asymmetry means that replacing one pronoun with another can change the interpretation even when the companion phrase stays unchanged. For Greek-to-Lower-Sorbian translation, trace the participants through the preceding account rather than relying on the visible words two and with. Determine whether the companion is already counted, whether the speaker belongs to the group, and whether a plural source expression is courteous singular address. Dual agreement, comitative interpretation and politeness are separate decisions that must converge on the same people in the final sentence.
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