Bhojpuri to Galician: the same possessive form can leave the owner ambiguous
Determine who owns the item before selecting the target phrase
Thakur Lohar’s Bhojpuri grammar distinguishes possessive expressions by person, number and honorificity. Galician third-person possessives can refer to more than one possible owner, including a courteous addressee. Xunta’s teaching resource explains the ambiguity of o seu libro: the book may belong to him, her, them or a formally addressed reader.
A Bhojpuri message about returning someone’s book therefore needs the owner tracked through the conversation. A target phrase can be grammatically correct while less explicit about that owner than the source context requires. If several people are present in the exchange, do not assume that the first eligible person mentioned must be the intended Galician possessor.
An explicit owner can be clearer than repeating seu
The Xunta resource illustrates o libro dela as a way to identify a female owner explicitly. For a Bhojpuri passage switching between the reader’s belongings and another person’s belongings, this type of construction can preserve the reference more clearly than repeating the same potentially ambiguous possessive.
The decision should follow the actual source ambiguity, not a rule to expand every possessive phrase. A Bhojpuri short form may already be clear to its original participants, while the reconstructed Galician passage presents several competing owners. Maintain the intended ownership relationship even where the target needs a more explicit expression than a one-word source equivalent.
Agreement follows the possessed noun, not the owner’s identity
The teaching resource states that Galician possessives agree in gender and number with the possessed expression. A Bhojpuri phrase should therefore be translated by first selecting the Galician noun and then the associated possessive form. A masculine-shaped target possessive does not by itself establish a male owner.
This becomes important when one person’s objects have different target noun genders. The owner can remain the same while the visible possessive form changes. Correcting those forms to match the owner’s gender would confuse two different kinds of information. Likewise, the number of owners should not be inferred from a plural form required because several items are possessed.
Ordinary possession can require an article, and distribution can add meaning
The Xunta lesson normally places an article before a prenominal possessive, illustrating constructions with o meu. It also describes cadanseu and related distributive forms, which express possession distributed to each participant. Bhojpuri ownership phrases cannot be translated by assuming that every target possessive follows one identical surface pattern.
For a Bhojpuri statement about children receiving belongings, establish whether the items are shared or each child receives their own. A Galician distributive form can make that difference explicit, but it must not be added when the source describes shared ownership. Owner reference, noun agreement, article use and distribution are separate decisions. Together they preserve the source relationship more accurately than selecting a single Galician word labelled his, her or their and repeating it without examining the phrase.
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