Lower Sorbian to Slovak: a conditional request needs more than the word by
A familiar-looking conditional marker has different companions
Lower Sorbian and Slovak both use by in conditional constructions, but that familiar shape is not a complete translation rule. Stone describes Lower Sorbian by as invariable. His ja by źełał and wej by źełałej differ elsewhere in their grammar while keeping that marker unchanged. The target must preserve who would act, rather than relying on the shared short word to carry every distinction.
Slovake.eu illustrates Slovak requests with conditional constructions containing by ste or by si. Those surrounding forms matter to the addressee relationship. A Lower Sorbian source can therefore require a target construction whose person marking cannot be selected just by retaining by and translating the lexical verb.
The dual addressee requires a fresh decision
Stone’s Lower Sorbian paradigm distinguishes second-person dual wej from plural wy. He additionally notes that wy can honorifically address one person or two. A written request can thus encode grammatical plural without referring to a crowd. Counting its addressees purely from that pronoun would already be unsafe before any Slovak wording is chosen.
The Slovak lesson’s courteous window-opening examples use ste. When translating a Lower Sorbian request to two people, or a respectful request to one, identify the real audience and level of address first. The target cannot be evaluated by asking whether its number label visually matches a Lower Sorbian dual or plural form. What matters is whether it appropriately addresses those people in this interaction.
A negative-looking question can request a positive action
Slovake.eu lists both positive and negative conditional questions as ways to request that a window be opened. Its Neotvorili by ste construction is presented alongside other polite requests, not as an instruction to keep the window closed. This is a practical warning against translating negative morphology independently of the question’s communicative purpose.
Lower Sorbian negation often appears directly on a predicate or auxiliary in Stone’s account. That provides evidence about the source construction, but the target request must still be interpreted as a whole. If someone wants the window opened, a Slovak negative conditional question can express that request without reversing the desired action. This observation concerns the attested request pattern, not every negative Slovak sentence.
Courtesy also changes the shape of the predicate
The Slovak resource contrasts a direct imperative with requests using the conditional, sometimes combined with a modal verb. A translator choosing a more courteous target version may therefore need to change the predicate construction, rather than only insert a word equivalent to please. The action remains opening the window, but its presentation to the recipient changes.
For this pair, distinguish three decisions: the Lower Sorbian participants indicated by pronouns and verb forms, the intended action, and the social force of the request. An invariable conditional marker does not erase source person information; an honorific plural does not establish a large audience; and a negative target question does not necessarily forbid the action. Keeping these distinctions separate makes a request usable for its actual recipient instead of merely preserving a few recognizable Slavic words.
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