Lower Sorbian to Belarusian: a familiar past participle can lose its person-marking auxiliary
A shared Slavic appearance can hide different clause information
Lower Sorbian and Belarusian past forms can look structurally familiar to readers of Slavic languages, but the information carried by their constructions differs. Stone describes the Sorbian perfect as a present form of be combined with an l-participle. Marchant describes the Belarusian past as marked for gender and number, not person. The target therefore cannot be assembled by retaining every source auxiliary as a separate past-tense word.
For a Lower Sorbian first-person account, the auxiliary can help identify who speaks even when a separate subject pronoun is absent. When rendering that account in Belarusian, make sure the speaker remains identifiable after rebuilding the past construction. A masculine or feminine past form alone does not distinguish I from you or a third-person subject.
Gender agreement cannot replace person reference
Marchant’s reading paradigm contrasts чытаў with чытала and чыталі. These forms distinguish grammatical gender or plurality in the past; they do not form a first-, second- and third-person series. A Lower Sorbian statement by a female speaker and a statement about another female person can therefore require the same Belarusian past verb form while differing in their subject reference.
This matters in a short reply that is meant to stand alone. If the Lower Sorbian auxiliary identifies the speaker but the target retains only a gender-marked past word, the reader may not know whose action is described. Recover the source participant from the complete clause rather than infer person from the ending’s resemblance to a familiar source participle.
The source dual needs interpretation beyond a target plural ending
Stone’s Lower Sorbian paradigm distinguishes the dual mej and wej from plural my and wy. That distinction can convey an exact pair. Marchant’s Belarusian past paradigm supplies a plural form without a corresponding dual past ending. Translating a source dual through the target plural alone can leave the number less specific than the original.
If a Lower Sorbian account means that the speaker and one other person read something, preserve the two-person interpretation through suitable wording or context. Do not infer a larger group merely because the Belarusian verb is plural. Conversely, an ordinary source plural should not acquire an exact count of two just because a preceding sentence described a pair.
Not every source past construction has the same register
Stone also distinguishes the analytic perfect from synthetic aorist and imperfect forms. His account notes that the latter survive in the literary languages but have disappeared from Lower Sorbian dialects. Thus the absence of a separate auxiliary in a source passage does not prove that it is present tense or that a word has been omitted accidentally.
A narrative source must be interpreted as a construction in its own right before selecting the Belarusian aspect and past form. The task is to preserve the event’s temporal and aspectual meaning, not to make the target contain the same number of verb words. This is particularly relevant when translating a literary passage alongside a conversational message.
For this pair, distinguish three questions throughout: whose action is reported, whether one person or a pair or larger group acted, and how the source presents that past event. Similar participle shapes help recognition, but they cannot answer all three when the auxiliary systems and number categories differ.
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