Referential Techniques in the Psalms: Challenges for interpretation and translation

Hi, Anne, There aren't very many examples in Psalms but I did find one instance in Psalm 37:3. Trust in the Lord anddo good. Then you will live safelyin the land and prosper. The second sentence was firsttranslated “If you do that you willlive safely....” However that meant “Ifyou (unlike me) do that you (unlike me) will live safely...” We changed it to“If we do that we will live safely...” Interestingly, it wasnot necessary to change the ‘you’ in the following verse 4 because the emphasiswas not on an action but a state, and the subject of the second clause wasanother person, so a different connector was used. 4 Let God be yourgreatest joy. That-being-the-case hewill give you…” Only a native speaker (who is not following the national version literally) can know what sounds best in any specific case.

I'm interested by this since, strictly speaking, 2nd person is always exclusive (otherwise it would be 1st person plural), thus not making any direct claims about the speaker at all. So, for example, if I tell my kid, "You run fast," my kid knows I'm not talking about myself, positively or negatively, so she doesn't assume the corollary, "Daddy doesn't run fast." Or if I say, "If you eat too much candy, your teeth will rot out," my kid won't be prevented from generalizing on account of my using English's exclusive 2nd person pronoun. I would assume that a language that has "strongly exclusive" 2nd person is one in which the linguistic exclusivity of "you" (shared by English) overrides context and/or knowledge of the world that would leave open the possibility of the speaker falling into the category specified by "you" (providing an effect that is unlike how we often interpret things in English). But the translation of Ps. 37:4 suggests that such a restriction doesn't apply across the board? Is it the case that "you ACTION" is always interpreted as necessarily excluding the speaker, but "you STATE" doesn't? It seems that the switch from "we" in 3 to "you" in 4 potentially undermines the coherence of the Psalm, which is using imperative consistently. Do native speakers interpret the "we" of 3 and the "you" of 4 as the same person? And more generally, do Palikur preachers completely avoid imperatives and "you should" and "you shouldn't" in their instruction? What wonderful diversity the world of languages offers us!