Lower Sorbian to Fijian: a dual expression with a companion can refer to more than two people
Do not translate a dual pronoun before reading its companion phrase
Lower Sorbian distinguishes dual mej and wej from plural personal pronouns. That makes a two-person interpretation a useful starting point, but Stone identifies a complication in comitative constructions. First- and second-person dual expressions combined with a companion can refer to either two or three people in total, depending on context. A translation into Fijian must recover the complete group before selecting its pronoun.
For example, Stone discusses a Lower Sorbian dual construction involving father. One context means father and the speaker; another includes the speaker, the speaker’s girlfriend and father. The surface presence of a dual expression therefore does not always settle whether the named companion is already counted within that pair or joins it as an additional participant.
Fijian distinguishes an exact pair from a smaller group
Hong’s Fijian pronoun study distinguishes dual forms from forms traditionally called trial. His discussion treats the latter as a limited plural, potentially several people rather than rigidly exactly three. The distinction between two and a few must therefore follow the participants established by the Lower Sorbian context.
If the source describes only the speaker and father, translating them as a larger limited group adds someone. If it includes a girlfriend as well, choosing a literal dual loses one participant. Before matching grammatical labels across the two languages, list the people included in the source event. This resolves a specific ambiguity that neither the source word dual nor the target label trial can solve alone.
The listener’s membership is another decision
Hong explains that Fijian distinguishes inclusive and exclusive first-person forms across nonsingular numbers. The choice depends on whether the person addressed belongs to the group. A Lower Sorbian statement about the speaker and father does not by itself establish whether the listener is that father, another member of the group or an outsider receiving the account.
This difference becomes consequential when a Lower Sorbian invitation reports that we will come with someone. The Fijian expression must not silently include the recipient if the source group excludes them, or exclude them if they are meant to join. Count and inclusion are independent: knowing that two people participate does not reveal whether one of them is the addressee.
Third-person companion constructions behave differently in the source
Stone distinguishes the first- and second-person pattern from a third-person dual with father, which he describes as referring to three people: the pair and father. That source contrast prevents a single mechanical rule for every dual-plus-companion expression. The grammatical person affects how the group is interpreted.
Hong also distinguishes Fijian subject and object pronouns, illustrating e rau for a dual subject and rau as a dual object. Once the Lower Sorbian group has been identified, preserve its role as actor or affected participant as well as its size. A correct count attached to the wrong grammatical relationship still changes the event.
The useful comparison for this pair is therefore unusually precise: determine whether the companion is included in the source pair, whether the listener belongs to the resulting group, and what role that group plays. These checks follow the documented Lower Sorbian comitative contrast and the Fijian number, inclusion and pronoun-role distinctions, rather than assuming that two languages with dual forms count every construction identically.
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