Lower Sorbian to Georgian: about a person is not always a physical location on them
Interpret the relation before translating the preposition
Stone’s Lower Sorbian personal-pronoun paradigm includes wo tebje, about you, alongside z tobu, with you. The separate preposition and inflected pronoun work together to identify a relationship. Georgian can express comparable information through a postposition attached after its complement, so copying the source word order is not a dependable way to build the target phrase.
Kock Kobaidze and Vamling’s Georgian course illustrates chem-ze as about me, while also describing -ze in physical on expressions. A Lower Sorbian source about discussing a person should therefore not be interpreted as placing something physically on that person merely because a target element has a spatial gloss elsewhere. The construction determines the relevant reading.
The first-person stem can change without introducing an owner
The Georgian course distinguishes me, I, from chem- used with the illustrated postpositions. It also notes that the same stem contributes to the possessive chemi, my. That resemblance does not make every chem- expression a statement about someone’s property.
For a Lower Sorbian message concerning the speaker, preserve the speaker as the relation’s complement. An expression meaning about me does not secretly introduce an omitted object belonging to me. Similarly, with me identifies a companion or associated person in the documented construction, rather than the speaker’s belongings. The target stem must be interpreted in its actual postpositional environment.
Lower Sorbian already uses different forms of the same personal reference across cases. That familiarity is useful here: an unfamiliar stem can continue to represent the same person. The mistake would be to select the target nominative dictionary form simply to keep its appearance consistent across a translation.
One change in Georgian does not apply to every pronoun
The course contrasts the first-person alternation with shen, chven and tkven, whose stems remain unchanged when postpositions are attached in its description. Thus a pattern learned from a first-person target phrase cannot be applied mechanically to a Lower Sorbian second-person or plural reference.
This is consequential when a source message contrasts information about me with information about you. The participant contrast must remain intact even if the target forms do not exhibit parallel-looking stem changes. Morphological symmetry is not a requirement for preserving a contrast between two people.
Written attachment and semantic attachment are separate questions
The Georgian course illustrates attached monosyllabic postpositions and separately written longer ones. It gives saxl-shi for in the house and saxlebs shoris for between the houses. The different written boundaries do not indicate that one relationship belongs less closely to its complement.
Lower Sorbian’s separate preposition can therefore become part of one written Georgian word or participate in a multiword target phrase. Decide which relationship the source expresses before comparing spaces. Adding a space just to imitate the source, or deleting a word boundary to make all target relation phrases look alike, is not a translation of that relationship.
Across these patterns, recover the source referent, distinguish a spatial reading from a discussion or association reading, and then apply the Georgian construction’s stem and attachment rules. Those decisions preserve what wo tebje and z tobu mean while allowing the target to organize the corresponding relation after its complement.
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