Persian to Slovenian: when two people require more than a plural
Read the Persian count before choosing a Slovenian group
Persian can make a group of two explicit without introducing a separate dual pronoun. Roberts records šomā do=tā hamdige=ro mi-šnās-id?, asking whether two addressed people know each other. The numeral and optional classifier identify the pair while the pronoun and verb belong to the ordinary plural system. In Slovenian, the corresponding participant count affects grammatical choices throughout the sentence; retaining a general plural merely because the Persian verb is plural can lose that distinction.
Counting nouns in Persian also does not provide a ready-made Slovenian ending. Roberts gives do(-tā) pesar for two boys and a version with a plural noun when the boys are identifiable. The Persian plural suffix in that second expression does not turn two people into a larger group. Likewise, its absence in the first does not make the boy singular in meaning. Interpret the quantity and reference together before selecting a Slovenian number pattern.
Two-person agreement belongs to the target construction
Jakop’s study distinguishes Standard Slovenian from colloquial varieties and dialects. In the standard language, dual agreement can link pronouns and verbs or nouns, adjectives and verbs. Her example midve pečeva kruh describes two female people baking bread. For a Persian account whose participants are two women, the target distinction is not supplied by Persian mā, we, alone: both the size and composition of the group must come from the passage.
Do not turn this into a rule that everything occurring in pairs must mechanically receive dual marking. Jakop notes that natural pairs normally use plural forms, with dual available when two or both is explicitly emphasized. She also documents differences in dual use across dialects and colloquial speech. Those observations explain why a message encountered online may differ from a standard written translation. They do not make an unqualified plural the standard default for an explicitly identified pair of people in a Persian source.
Follow the same pair beyond the subject position
The SSKJ² dictionary defines midva as a pair including the speaker. It records different case forms, including naju and nama, and illustrates the pronoun in emphatic or contrasting subject expressions. Thus a Persian speaker and companion remain the same two participants even when a Slovenian sentence no longer uses the subject form. Searching for midva alone will miss other references to that pair.
The dictionary’s med nama ni skrivnosti means there are no secrets between the two of us. This provides a useful distinction for Persian reciprocal expressions: the target prepositional phrase identifies both the relationship and the two-person group. The dictionary also records dative uses expressing belonging or personal involvement, so an unfamiliar dual pronoun is not necessarily a second subject. In a Persian narrative alternating between what we did, what happened to us and what exists between us, trace the two participants through these changing grammatical roles rather than replacing every reference with one fixed Slovenian word.
Language references