Basque to Punjabi: adjective endings can change without changing the description
Basque does not normally give an adjective masculine and feminine endings
Laka describes Basque nouns and adjectives as lacking grammatical gender endings in the nominal system. Her zaldi zuri hau places white after horse and before the demonstrative. A Punjabi translation must retain the colour and referent, but its adjective need not remain in that position or retain one form across different nouns.
The gender information needed by a Punjabi description can come from the target noun rather than a visible Basque adjective ending. An absence of masculine or feminine morphology in the source is therefore not evidence that the Punjabi phrase is defective when its adjective changes to agree with the noun.
Punjabi has both changing and unchanging adjective classes
Gill and Gleason distinguish inflected and uninflected adjective classes, named after their black and red examples. The first class changes for gender, number and case; the second does not follow that same inflectional pattern. Their terminology describes grammatical classes rather than saying that only black and red have these properties.
Their noun-modifier examples ਚੰਗਾ ਮੁੰਡਾ and ਚੰਗੀ ਕੁੜੀ illustrate a good boy and a good girl. The quality remains good while the inflecting adjective changes with the noun. A Basque-to-Punjabi translation should not interpret the different ending as a new quality, and should not force an uninflected adjective to imitate the changing class.
The noun phrase’s role can affect its form
Goenaga’s Basque analysis distinguishes the grammatical role of an entire noun phrase from the individual words inside it. Case marking appears at the phrase edge. In a descriptive phrase, the final word can consequently carry information about the whole expression’s role rather than an independent meaning belonging only to that word.
Punjabi inflecting adjectives have direct and oblique forms in Gill and Gleason’s paradigm. When a Basque description moves into a target construction requiring an oblique phrase, preserve the same object while allowing its Punjabi adjective to follow that construction. A changed ending need not mean that the description now applies to somebody else.
The owner’s identity does not automatically set the object’s adjective
A Basque genitive phrase identifies a relationship within the larger noun phrase; Goenaga treats it separately from the clause-level structural roles. In a description of a person’s possession, first distinguish the owner from the thing described. A masculine owner does not by itself make every owned object grammatically masculine in Punjabi.
Laka also distinguishes post-noun adjectives from preceding possessive modifiers in Basque. Read those layers separately before adapting the description. Otherwise a phrase about somebody’s small object can become a statement about a small owner, even when the vocabulary for owner and object is present.
For a Basque inventory containing the same colour across several different objects, keep each noun paired with its own adjective. The Punjabi class determines whether the adjective changes; the noun and phrase construction determine the required agreement. This preserves the inventory’s actual descriptions without treating every target ending as a separate source fact.
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