Lower Sorbian to Upper Sorbian: related paradigms can hide a lost pair distinction
The genitive dual has different visibility
Igartua directly contrasts Lower Sorbian grod-owu, genitive dual of castles, with grod-ow, genitive plural. His Upper Sorbian comparison gives hrod-ow for both dual and plural genitive. A distinct Lower Sorbian pair can therefore correspond to a target form whose ending alone does not distinguish the pair from a larger group.
For an original source description related to two castles, a formally appropriate Upper Sorbian genitive may still need its referent recovered from the surrounding phrase. The shared target ending is not evidence that the source pair has become several castles, but it also does not independently preserve the exact count.
This matters in a report comparing repairs to two buildings with repairs to other buildings. Keep the pair identified through the target context or explicit count where necessary. A familiar cognate stem and a plausible ending are not sufficient evidence that the comparison’s participant sets remain distinct.
The resemblance is grammatical, not complete identity
The two castle forms illustrate both a related word and a different inflectional contrast. Translating by changing a few letters in the stem while preserving every Lower Sorbian ending would ignore the Upper Sorbian paradigm. Replacing every dual with a general plural would lose source meaning in the opposite direction.
For an original reference to objects belonging to a pair of people, distinguish the owners’ number from the owned items’ number. A target form that allows both dual and plural readings must be interpreted through the actual owner phrase. Several items do not establish that there are more than two owners.
The comparison should stay specifically Lower-to-Upper Sorbian. Igartua uses their genitive-dual divergence as a concrete distinction; a generic label Sorbian would conceal exactly the feature the translator needs to preserve. Similar language names are not a reason to treat the two inflectional systems as one.
A Lower Sorbian supine is another point requiring conversion
Gerald Stone’s comparative grammar describes a supine retained in Lower Sorbian, used after motion verbs, rather than a shared productive form in both literary languages. Its discussion also notes dialectal limits within the Lower Sorbian area. This construction should not be transferred simply as an unchanged special ending into Upper Sorbian.
For an original source instruction to go somewhere for an activity, preserve both movement and purpose. The target does not need the same named nonfinite category to express that relationship. But dropping the purpose because its source form lacks a direct matching paradigm would make the journey’s reason disappear.
The exact-pair work is therefore selective: preserve the source pair even where Upper Sorbian case forms merge its visible distinction, and preserve the source motion-purpose relationship while using an appropriate target verb construction. These are ordinary meaning-preservation tasks made less obvious by close resemblance. Read each paradigm as belonging to its own language instead of treating cognate vocabulary as proof that the endings and constructions must also match.
Language references