Lower Sorbian to Konkani: separate a future trip from a remembered promise
The source can place movement in the future and its purpose afterwards
Arkadiev’s comparative study quotes a Lower Sorbian sentence about going to look for Lenka tomorrow. It identifies a future movement verb and a supine expressing the search. The message concerns a planned journey with a purpose; the person being sought is not the subject of the journey.
For a Konkani translation, preserve both the future time of going and the search as its purpose. A form labelled future in a target grammar does not, by itself, establish that the whole target sentence announces a future trip. The function of the form inside its particular construction matters.
This is especially useful when an original Lower Sorbian message contrasts what the speaker intends to do tomorrow with what they repeatedly intended in earlier years. The source can mention similar activities in both, but the time of intending and the time of the intended action are separate parts of the meaning.
A Goan construction gives future participles a restricted past-habitual use
Peterson and Mopkar describe Standard Goan Konkani future participles in several functions. One restricted construction uses them with predicates such as promising, intending and thinking while giving the main predicate a past-habitual interpretation. A following complement concerns an event subsequent to those promises or intentions.
An original Lower Sorbian reminiscence meaning that someone repeatedly promised to visit is therefore different from a current announcement that the person will visit. A target future-participle shape in the documented promise construction need not turn the earlier promises into future promises. Interpret the main predicate and its complement separately.
The authors also distinguish a single past promise from the restricted past-habitual construction. A source statement about one promise made yesterday should not be translated as a recurring disposition simply because the same promise verb is available. Repetition is part of the intended event structure, not an optional stylistic flourish.
Do not transfer a construction label between the languages
The Lower Sorbian supine described in the source comparison concerns a nonfinite purpose construction after movement. The Konkani future participle discussed by Peterson and Mopkar has several other functions. Both being special verb forms does not make them equivalent categories with identical time reference.
For an original Lower Sorbian explanation of repeatedly planning a journey but never taking it, preserve the distinction between repeated planning and actual travel. A target that announces the trip as a future fact can strengthen an unrealized intention into a commitment. A target that reports completed travel can go further and claim the journey happened.
This guide concerns the Standard Goan variety investigated in the article, not a universal construction across all Konkani varieties. The exact-pair comparison is chronological: when did the promising or intending occur, when was the intended action meant to occur, and did the source assert that it happened? Let those relationships guide the target construction instead of treating the label future as a complete translation of the Lower Sorbian time structure.
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