Lower Sorbian to Assamese: separate respectful address from the number of listeners
Wy can conceal a smaller audience than its plural form suggests
Stone’s Lower Sorbian description distinguishes singular, dual and plural personal pronouns. It also notes that second-person plural wy can address one person, or two, honorifically. A translation into Assamese must therefore establish both the actual audience and the social relationship. Treating the visible plural form as a headcount can turn a courteous message to one reader into an instruction to a group.
Joynal Ali’s Assamese research separates honorificity from number. Its second-person system distinguishes non-honorific tɔi, honorific tumi and high-honorific apuni. A Lower Sorbian respectful form does not select the Assamese number by itself, and the target’s choice among social levels is not settled merely by recognizing a source plural ending.
A real pair is different from one person addressed politely
Lower Sorbian wej is a dual second-person pronoun in Stone’s paradigm. It supplies information about a pair that is not identical to the information conveyed by an honorific wy used for a single addressee. When the source names two people, retain that number rather than flattening both constructions into a general polite you.
Ali’s Assamese paradigm forms plural pronouns separately from the singular honorific stems, illustrating tuma.lʊk and apuna.lʊk. The source dual therefore requires a genuinely multiple-addressee interpretation, whereas a respectful singular source requires a singular interpretation. The target may need contextual wording to retain an exact pair if plurality alone would leave the count open. This is a translation consequence of the contrasting categories, not a claim that Assamese has a matching grammatical dual.
The verb’s respectful form does not count the people
Ali illustrates different second-person imperative endings for the three honorific levels, while keeping the same ending when each level’s pronoun changes from singular to plural. For example, the high-honorific instruction uses bɔl-ɔk with either the singular or plural high-honorific pronoun. The verb form alone does not distinguish one listener from several.
A Lower Sorbian reader may be accustomed to number distinctions appearing in the verbal expression as well as the pronoun. Applying that expectation to an Assamese result could lead to an unnecessary correction: an unchanged verb after a plural pronoun is not automatically missing plural agreement. Check which information the target construction actually encodes rather than demanding the same distribution as the source.
Changing the plural suffix does not raise the social level
The Assamese study also distinguishes plural suffixes compatible with different pronoun stems. It explicitly rejects using the honorific plural pattern with a non-honorific stem as though that suffix alone could make the expression respectful. Thus a courteous Lower Sorbian wy should not be translated by choosing a familiar target stem and attaching a supposedly polite plural ending.
The decisions need to proceed separately: recover the source addressee count, establish whether the address is familiar or respectful, then choose a consistent Assamese pronoun and second-person verb pattern. A message to two close friends, a message to one respected person and a message to several respected people can all require different target analysis even when the Lower Sorbian wording makes some of their visible forms overlap. The aim is to preserve the relationship between speaker and audience as well as the instruction itself.
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