Lower Sorbian to Armenian: the reason for a journey needs its own target construction
The source supine identifies an intended activity
Arkadiev’s comparative discussion quotes a Lower Sorbian construction containing motion and a supine: Witśe pojěd-u Lenk-u pyta-t, meaning that tomorrow the speaker will go and look for Lenka. The search is the purpose of the journey. It is not a second event reported as already completed.
DOBES likewise identifies the Lower Sorbian supine as a special nonfinite form following motion verbs. In translation into Armenian, retaining the idea of going while omitting the special source form would remove why the person is going. Expanding it as an accomplished search could instead add an unsupported result.
For an original source message about going to collect something, distinguish intention from success. The traveller may make the journey without finding the object. The Armenian version should preserve the intended activity without silently promising that the collection will actually be completed.
An Armenian case-marked infinitive can express purpose
Dum-Tragut’s Modern Eastern Armenian grammar describes a final use of the dative infinitive, also combined with hamar in a colloquial construction. Her sheep-milking example expresses bringing the sheep in order to milk it. The relevant ending belongs to a verb-based expression of purpose, rather than identifying a person who receives something.
That is useful for Lower Sorbian sources where a compact supine makes the purpose relationship easy to overlook. Armenian can use its own nonfinite construction to express the intended action. It does not need to recreate a category with exactly the same name or imitate the Lower Sorbian ending.
The grammar also describes the older bare-infinitive final construction as obsolete or highly literary. A formally imaginable infinitive sequence is therefore not automatically the best ordinary target wording. The choice should fit Modern Eastern Armenian usage, which is the variety covered by this reference, rather than an undifferentiated label Armenian.
Keep the searched-for person separate from the purpose expression
In the Lower Sorbian example, Lenka is the object of looking for. Arkadiev specifically glosses that name as accusative in the modern Lower Sorbian comparison. It should not be assigned the different case pattern discussed elsewhere in his article for another language merely because the whole paper concerns nonfinite clauses.
In Armenian, a case-marked infinitive can express the activity’s purpose while an accompanying noun phrase identifies the participant in that activity. Those are different jobs. Translating the purpose as though it were a human recipient would distort the relation between the traveller, the search and the person being sought.
An original instruction to go and help a named person similarly contains both a journey and its intended action. Preserve who travels, who needs help and what the journey is for. The source motion verb does not by itself establish that the help has occurred, and the target purpose expression must not turn the intended beneficiary into the traveller.
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