Lower Sorbian to Sinhala: self-reference does not settle whether an event was controlled
The Lower Sorbian reflexive has several jobs
Stone’s Lower Sorbian account distinguishes a reflexive construction such as myś se, wash oneself, from verbs where the reflexive is part of the lexical expression. His bojaś se means fear, and zdaś se means seem. The same short form therefore does not always announce a deliberate action directed back at its performer.
This matters when translating into spoken Sinhala, where the relationship between a participant and an event can affect both the noun phrase and the predicate. A translation based only on finding a word corresponding to self may preserve the wrong meaning: the source may describe a feeling, an appearance or an event affecting the person, rather than an intentional self-directed action.
A person affected by an event can receive unexpected case marking
Jany’s spoken-Sinhala study gives maawə wæṭe-nəwa for I am falling involuntarily. The first-person expression is accusative even though there is no second core participant acting on the speaker. This differs from using an accusative label as a simple test for the object of a two-person event.
For a Lower Sorbian report of an accident, identify the event and the speaker’s involvement before selecting a Sinhala case form. If the source says the speaker fell, the target should not invent another person who caused the fall merely because an accusative participant occurs. Conversely, the presence of a reflexive source construction does not establish that the speaker controlled what happened.
A target self-reading may emerge through the whole construction
The same study notes maavə kæpuna with the interpretation I cut myself. Here an affected participant and the predicate together convey the self-involving event. It is not evidence that every Lower Sorbian se needs an independent Sinhala reflexive word, nor that every accidental event should be translated through one identical target template.
A source description of washing oneself and a report of accidentally being cut can both concern the speaker’s own body, but differ in control and event structure. A useful translation preserves that difference. Treating every reflexive expression as intentional can distort the accident report; treating every self-directed action as involuntary can distort an ordinary account of personal care.
Feelings require interpretation rather than a case-name match
Jany also describes dative experiencers with certain perception and cognition predicates. Her analysis ties the target patterns to verb choice, animacy and participant meaning, with explicit exceptions and variety restrictions. Thus a Lower Sorbian feeling verb must be translated through the appropriate Sinhala lexical construction, rather than by transferring the source reflexive or assigning case solely from a grammatical label.
Stone’s lexical reflexives provide the practical warning: fearing is not simply the same action as fearing oneself, and seeming is not an ordinary action performed on oneself. Before translating, decide which of these meanings the Lower Sorbian verb actually expresses. Then determine how the chosen spoken-Sinhala construction represents its experiencer or affected participant. The comparison separates three things that can otherwise be confused: reflexive form, self-reference and control over an event. They can coincide, but neither source nor target makes them interchangeable in every sentence.
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