Arabic to Faroese: the target noun controls more than its dictionary meaning
Arabic masculine and feminine do not predict Faroese gender
Arabic nouns belong to masculine or feminine grammatical patterns. Faroese has masculine, feminine, and neuter noun gender, with its own assignments. A noun’s Arabic agreement therefore cannot be used as a shortcut for deciding the gender of its translation. The target word and the target construction determine Faroese agreement.
This is visible even in possessive phrases. The Faroese corpus documentation gives mín hundur, my dog, and mítt barn, my child. The differing possessive forms concern the grammatical properties of the possessed noun, not a change in the speaker’s sex. Arabic first-person possession can use the same owner suffix across different nouns; Faroese may require a different agreeing form. Check the complete phrase when replacing an Arabic noun in a saved sentence, rather than changing the target noun and leaving every adjacent word untouched.
An owner suffix does not require a matching target suffix
Arabic commonly attaches a personal suffix to a noun to identify its owner. Faroese offers several possessive constructions. The phrase bókin hjá mær, my book, uses a preposition with a personal pronoun. Such a phrase is a grammatical way to express ownership, not an accidental translation of Arabic location words.
For an Arabic message about a document belonging to the speaker, the main question is whether the Faroese phrase identifies that same owner. It need not preserve the source’s word boundaries. Other Faroese possessive constructions have their own agreement and ordering requirements. Do not combine parts from several patterns simply to reproduce the Arabic suffix more visibly. When the Arabic owner refers back to a person already mentioned, also establish who that person is before choosing a reflexive or non-reflexive target construction. A grammatically well-formed possessive can still name the wrong owner.
Faroese case belongs to the target sentence
Standard Arabic and Faroese both have case distinctions, but their categories and the constructions selecting them are not identical. Faroese distinguishes nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. A source ending, especially in a fully vocalised Arabic text, cannot be transferred into a mechanically corresponding target ending.
A Faroese noun phrase may change after a preposition or because of its relationship to a verb. In an Arabic travel instruction, keep destination, location, and possession separate when checking those forms. Arabic prepositions are useful evidence for the intended relationship, but the Faroese expression governs its own case. This is particularly important with proper names: preserve the name’s identity while allowing established target grammatical forms. Do not treat every ending added to a recognisable place or person as a spelling error, or remove an ending merely because the original Arabic name did not contain it.
Language references