Tibetan to Slovenian: two participants need a different decision from an unspecified group
An understood Tibetan count must be recovered before agreement
Jäschke’s historical Tibetan grammar notes that plural marking may be absent when circumstances make number clear. A passage can therefore refer to more than one participant without repeating a visible plural marker. For Slovenian, the intended count must be recovered rather than inferred from the number of overt source endings.
Greenberg’s standard Slovenian grammar distinguishes singular, dual, and plural. Two people acting together require a different analysis from a larger or unspecified group. If an earlier Tibetan sentence establishes exactly two travellers, continuing references to them should not lose that count merely because the next source clause is economical.
We two does not settle whether the listener is included
Greenberg explains that first-person dual reference can mean the speaker and listener or the speaker and another person. The dual count alone consequently does not establish membership. His construction Midva z Miranom greva v Lendavo explicitly identifies Miran as the speaker’s companion.
In Tibetan-to-Slovenian translation, recover who the two participants are before treating dual agreement as sufficient. A message sent to a third person may describe the writer and a companion rather than invite the reader along. Giving that message a dual form with an unresolved participant can preserve the quantity while changing the actual people involved.
Naturally paired things are not a mechanical dual exception to ignore
Greenberg notes that normally paired items such as eyes or hands ordinarily appear in the plural with plural agreement. Dual can be used when the pairedness itself is emphasized. His contrast includes lepe oči, beautiful eyes, and z obema rokama, with both hands.
A Tibetan description involving two body parts therefore cannot be translated by counting to two and imposing the same number construction used for two travellers. Determine whether the source simply names the usual body parts or specifically emphasizes both of them. A target dual choice may make that pairedness salient where the original does not, while a plural choice in an explicit both instruction may remove useful emphasis.
Respect for a person does not establish a larger group
Jäschke separately describes Tibetan respectful personal reference. Such social information must not be treated as proof that several people are involved. The source may concern one honored person, two actual participants, or several people; these possibilities require independent interpretation.
Zeisler’s account of personal epistemic authority in Standard Spoken Tibetan concerns familiarity or involvement in knowledge, another distinction separate from participant count. Neither a respectful source form nor a speaker-centered knowledge form can substitute for establishing how many people act. In this direction, maintain the actual membership of a pair, use the Slovenian number construction suited to the particular noun or predicate, and preserve social or epistemic information through wording that actually expresses it. Correct dual agreement is valuable precisely because it represents two identified participants, not because it decorates any source phrase suggesting togetherness.
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