Lower Sorbian to Marathi: the subject is not always what the target verb tracks
The source accusative identifies a participant, not a target agreement rule
Arkadiev quotes the Lower Sorbian sentence Witśe pojěd-u Lenk-u pyta-t, expressing that tomorrow the speaker will go and look for Lenka. Lenka is explicitly glossed as accusative. The sentence identifies someone being sought while the speaker performs the journey and intended search.
The Marathi Universal Dependencies overview describes a different distribution of grammatical marking across constructions: present-tense subjects are nominative, while a past transitive pattern has an ergative actor and agreement with an eligible object. This is not a reason to copy Lower Sorbian participant endings unchanged into Marathi.
For an original source account of someone finding Lenka, first identify the finder and the person found. The target clause must preserve those roles even if its actor carries marking unfamiliar from the source. A marked actor does not become the object simply because the target grammatical pattern differs.
Purpose and completed events cannot share a careless tense conversion
The Lower Sorbian example contains a supine after a motion verb. It describes going in order to search, not a report that the search succeeded. DOBES identifies that special nonfinite construction as a feature of Lower Sorbian. Its intended-event status must be retained before choosing any Marathi finite-clause agreement pattern.
The Marathi overview also distinguishes nonfinite verb forms and several aspects. The existence of a target category labelled supine does not establish that every Lower Sorbian supine can be replaced mechanically by a form carrying that label. Category names are a starting point for analysis, not proof of identical distribution.
Compare an original source plan to go and seek someone with a later report that the speaker sought that person. The first concerns purpose; the second asserts a past action. Turning both into the same target past transitive structure would erase the difference before any agreement decision was made.
A pair can affect interpretation without supplying a target dual ending
DOBES notes active dual number in Lower Sorbian. The Marathi morphology overview describes singular and plural as its main nominal number values. An exact source pair therefore cannot simply be assumed recoverable from a matching productive target dual ending throughout the sentence.
For an original past account in which two people find one item, keep two actors distinct from one object. In a target construction where an eligible object controls agreement, a singular-looking verb does not independently prove that only one person acted. Reading its number as though it always copied the source subject would reverse the inference.
Conversely, two objects found by one person do not imply two finders. The translation needs the source quantities assigned to the correct participants, with Marathi case marking and agreement selected for the actual clause. Purpose, event completion, actor count and object count each contribute different information; none can safely be inferred from one familiar-looking verb ending alone.
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