Tibetan to Fijian: a group needs a size and a relationship to the listener
Plural is only the beginning of the group description
Garrett and Hill’s written Tibetan corpus study treats items such as rnams and dag as plural markers. Recognising a source group is essential, but that information alone does not select every target pronoun. Mary Dalrymple’s discussion of Boumaa Fijian describes singular, dual, paucal and plural distinctions in its subject-pronoun system.
The target evidence is specifically Boumaa, not a promise that every Fijian variety uses an identical paradigm. It nevertheless demonstrates a practical translation problem: a Tibetan reference to several people may need more information about group size before the appropriate Fijian expression can be chosen. More than one is not always a sufficiently detailed interpretation.
Two people can include or exclude the addressee
In the Boumaa paradigm, etaru is first-person inclusive dual and ’eirau is exclusive dual. Both refer to a speaker-containing pair. Their difference concerns whether the listener is the other participant, rather than whether the pair is familiar or whether the speaker knows the event well.
A Tibetan account of two people planning a journey therefore needs its audience identified. If the speaker addresses their travelling companion, the pair includes that listener. If the speaker explains the same journey to somebody staying behind, the pair excludes the listener. The people taking the journey can remain unchanged while the appropriate target reference changes with the conversational setting.
A small group is not necessarily the same as an unrestricted plural
Dalrymple lists tou as the Boumaa inclusive paucal alongside a separate inclusive plural form. A translation must consequently avoid equating every Tibetan plural group with either an exact pair or an unrestricted larger group. Explicit counts in the source are especially valuable when the target distinguishes more number categories.
Garrett and Hill distinguish Tibetan cardinal forms such as gñis, two, from ordinal forms. This matters when recovering group size: a phrase referring to the second person in a sequence does not itself identify two people participating together. Read the numeral’s function before using it as evidence for a target dual pronoun.
The person reporting is not automatically part of the group
Zeisler connects egophoric marking in Standard Spoken Tibetan with personal authority, responsibility or involvement. Such a source perspective can help interpret the account, but it is not a mechanical instruction to make every mentioned group first person. A speaker may have reliable knowledge about people they are not accompanying.
In a translated journey report, identify the actual travellers separately from the person narrating and the person receiving the message. Then establish the group’s size and whether the addressee belongs to it. This prevents three distinct changes of meaning: adding the narrator to somebody else’s trip, excluding an intended companion, or describing a pair as a larger group. The target pronoun should express the recovered participants, not merely echo the source plural marker.
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