Lower Sorbian to Vietnamese: a past event need not have reached its endpoint
Do not translate the source auxiliary in isolation
Pankau’s colloquial Lower Sorbian examples include compound past expressions whose auxiliary has a form also used with present-tense be. In his raspberry question, the entire construction locates possession in the previous year. The auxiliary’s isolated dictionary gloss does not determine the time of the whole clause.
Vietnamese researcher Trang Phan similarly argues against treating đã as a simple past-tense replacement or a universal guarantee of completion. Her writing example describes activity yesterday while explicitly saying that the paper remains unfinished. The event can precede the reference time without having reached its intended endpoint.
For an original Lower Sorbian statement that someone was writing yesterday, a target clause must not claim that the document was finished unless the source supplies that result. Matching the past time is only one part of preserving the event. The ongoing or incomplete nature of the writing remains a separate meaning.
Completion can require an additional result expression
Phan also gives wiping examples containing xong, expressing completion, with alternative positions around the object. Her analysis treats these postverbal elements separately from the preverbal marker. The relevant difference is not merely stylistic placement: the construction explicitly supplies an endpoint.
Compare original Lower Sorbian accounts meaning someone worked on cleaning the table and someone finished cleaning it. A Vietnamese version that adds completion to both would overstate the first. A version that omits the endpoint from the second could leave the reader unsure whether the table is ready.
The Lower Sorbian source must therefore be read for its actual aspectual and lexical result information, not just for the presence of a past auxiliary. A visible target đã cannot independently verify that the same result has been asserted. Read the target activity and any completion expression together.
An intended search is different again from finding someone
Arkadiev’s Lower Sorbian comparison includes going tomorrow to look for Lenka, with a supine expressing the intended search. The person may undertake that journey without succeeding. Treating the source as if it already reports a successful search would change both its temporal status and its outcome.
Phan’s discussion includes a result construction with tìm ra, where the expression means finding rather than merely searching. That target result must not be introduced automatically when a Lower Sorbian source describes an intention to look for a person. The existence of a named object does not establish success.
An original source sequence can distinguish a plan to search, a later search in progress and a final report of finding the person. Vietnamese needs to preserve those stages through the appropriate activity, time and result constructions. Phan’s analysis offers useful evidence that these meanings are distributed across more than one grammatical element; it should not be reduced to a one-word past-tense substitution rule.
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