Persian to Samoan: distinguish a shared plan from an instruction to somebody else
A Persian group does not specify the listener’s membership
Persian mā identifies the speaker’s group without encoding a separate inclusive or exclusive distinction in that pronoun. Roberts’s personal-pronoun table supplies the ordinary singular and plural forms, while other parts of a sentence can specify the participants more closely. In a Persian message about what we will do, the listener may be part of the plan or may simply be receiving news of another group’s plans. Those readings lead to different Samoan pronoun choices.
The Persian verb also needs contextual interpretation before that choice is made. Roberts shows a present imperfective eating-lunch example with habitual, currently ongoing and future readings. Consequently, an apparent present form in a Persian plan should not automatically be rendered as a current event. Establish whether the group is reporting a routine, describing what is happening now or announcing a future action. The participants and the time interpretation are separate decisions: an inclusive group is not necessarily issuing an invitation.
Read a Persian instruction as an addressed action
The University of Texas imperative lesson distinguishes second-person singular commands from forms carrying the second-person plural ending. Its bégu means say, while bénešin means sit. Such forms direct an action toward the addressee; they do not grammatically include the speaker merely because the message is friendly or concerns an activity the speaker also wants to happen. This distinction matters when a Samoan rendering makes the listener’s participation explicit.
The lesson also explains that negative commands use a different prefix, illustrated by nágir, do not take. A Persian request preventing an action is therefore different from a report that the speaker’s group does not perform it. Before selecting Samoan participants, separate who is being addressed from who is actually instructed to act. The Persian command’s ending identifies an addressee pattern, while the broader conversation establishes whether a shared plan surrounds that command. Preserve both layers rather than converting an instruction into an inclusive statement about us.
Samoan pronouns make the group’s boundary visible
Michael Billington’s speaker-assisted Samoan teaching resource distinguishes tātou, which includes the listener in a group of three or more, from matou, which excludes the listener. It separately distinguishes two-person groups. For a Persian announcement using mā, choosing between these is a statement about membership, not an optional stylistic variation. A speaker reporting a visiting party and a speaker proposing an activity with the recipient may both use the Persian we form while requiring different Samoan references.
The resource also distinguishes long pronouns from short forms used in particular verbal constructions. Its short-pronoun pattern generally places the time marker before the pronoun and verb, with te illustrated as an exception following the pronoun. Thus resolving who belongs to the Persian group is only the first step: the selected Samoan form must fit its clause. Do not exchange a long and short form merely to keep the Persian word sequence. The target pronoun expresses both a participant choice and a construction appropriate to that particular statement.
Language references