Lower Sorbian to Indonesian: object endings, group membership and repeated forms
Case endings in a source count are not extra participants
Stone’s Sorbian grammar gives the specifically Lower Sorbian examples mam dweju konjowu, I have two horses, and mam tśoch konjow, I have three horses. The endings change as number and the grammatical treatment of animate objects interact. An Indonesian translation should preserve the number of horses, rather than assign an additional lexical meaning to every change on the source noun or numeral.
This is also a reason to keep Lower Sorbian distinct from Upper Sorbian. Stone explicitly contrasts their treatment of animal-denoting masculine dual objects. A form familiar from an Upper Sorbian resource is not automatically the right interpretation of the Lower Sorbian input. For Indonesian output, identify the object and its quantity before assessing the target phrase: a shorter sequence can preserve that information without imitating a source case ending.
We may need to specify whether the reader belongs to the group
Lower Sorbian’s active dual distinguishes a pair from larger groups. Indonesian introduces a different group distinction through kami and kita. The Indonesian grammatical annotation team identifies kami as exclusive and kita as inclusive: whether the addressee is included matters independently of whether the group contains two people or several.
Consequently, a Lower Sorbian statement about what the speaker and one colleague will do cannot be translated reliably by choosing an Indonesian first-person plural solely because the original uses a dual. Establish whether the colleague is the person receiving the message. An invitation involving speaker and addressee differs from a report about the speaker and somebody else. Indonesian can make that membership contrast while expressing the exact group size through other wording. Neither distinction substitutes for the other.
A hyphenated repetition can be conventional target spelling
The Indonesian government’s EYD V rules use a hyphen to connect the parts of repeated forms, illustrating anak-anak and berulang-ulang. These target spellings should not be treated as accidental duplicated output merely because the Lower Sorbian original contains a single word or uses inflection instead. The target’s word-building and writing conventions differ from the source’s endings.
The same official rules distinguish this use from a hyphen showing a word broken at the end of a line. That distinction matters when reading a copied translation: joining a line-break fragment and deleting a hyphen inside a conventional repeated form are different edits. For a Lower Sorbian passage containing inflected quantity expressions, judge whether the Indonesian retains the intended quantity or repetition in its full phrase. Do not delete one half of a target form just to make its visual length resemble the source.
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