Tibetan to Upper Sorbian: a present-looking form can describe a future arrival
Read the event before assigning a tense label
The Upper Sorbian documentation distinguishes the formally present appearance of some perfective forms from their future meaning. Its contrast du domoj and přińdu domoj separates going home now from coming home in the future. A Tibetan event description should therefore not be translated by selecting a target form only because its grammatical label resembles a source label.
The relevant question is when and how the event is presented in the Tibetan passage. A report of an ongoing journey and an announcement of an arrival still ahead must remain different. Recognising the shared idea of going home is not sufficient to preserve that distinction.
A genuinely future form supplies another possibility
The same documentation gives póńdu domoj for I will go home and describes a periphrastic future built with być and an infinitive. This means that an Upper Sorbian future message cannot be assembled from a single universal replacement for Tibetan future-related material. The chosen verb and construction both matter.
Zeisler’s account of Standard Spoken Tibetan also cautions against treating epistemic markers as mere person labels. A Tibetan speaker’s own involvement in a journey may affect source perspective, but it does not determine which Upper Sorbian motion verb or future construction expresses the journey itself. Preserve the event direction and time separately from the speaker’s relation to the information.
Two participants can require dual agreement
Upper Sorbian distinguishes singular, dual and plural, with number appearing on nouns, pronouns and agreeing words including verbs. A Tibetan source reference to a group must therefore be read for its actual size. A target verb may need to reflect an exact pair rather than an unrestricted plural.
Garrett and Hill distinguish Tibetan gñis, two, from ordinal gñis-pa, second, in their written-corpus analysis. That distinction matters here: a second traveller is a position in a series, while two travellers supplies a count. Do not infer a dual group merely because a numeral-like source component has been recognised.
The person expected home differs from the person reporting
Zeisler describes the Standard Spoken Tibetan perspective system as centred on the speaker in statements and on the addressee in information-seeking questions. A translated dialogue about an arrival therefore needs careful attribution of each turn. The person asking when someone will return is not necessarily one of the returning travellers.
In Upper Sorbian, the target participant count, person and event viewpoint must all express the recovered situation. An exact pair coming home can be discussed by a third person who stays elsewhere. Keep the narrator outside the travelling pair where the source does so, and retain the difference between asking about an expected arrival and asserting that the journey is already underway.
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