Bosnian to Galician: the possessive ending follows the item, not the owner
A changing form need not identify a different person
Bosnian possessives have inflected forms that must be interpreted together with their nouns. Galician likewise changes possessive shape according to the possessed noun’s gender and number. Similar agreement systems do not guarantee that an identical source form will fit every target noun.
The Xunta teaching resource explains the contrast through forms such as meu and miña. The grammatical properties belong to the possession rather than directly identifying the owner’s sex. A Bosnian list of belongings can therefore require different Galician possessive forms while all items continue to belong to the same person.
This is useful when the source first mentions a relative and then the relative’s possessions. The gender of that person and the grammatical gender of each item are separate facts. A target ending should follow the selected Galician noun rather than be chosen solely from the owner’s gender-bearing source description.
Seu can leave several owners possible
The same resource notes that third-person singular and plural possessive forms coincide. Seu can therefore leave an ambiguity between a single owner, several owners or a formally addressed listener. A Bosnian source identifying one of these clearly should not become unnecessarily unclear in the target.
The resource illustrates o libro dela to make a female owner explicit. That construction can be useful when a source mentions several people and then assigns the book to one woman. Its purpose is to identify the owner, not to change the grammatical gender of the book.
A source reflexive possessive introduces another question: whether the owner is the actor. The Bosnian specification records svoj as reflexive. The Galician resource discusses propio as a way to clarify a reflexive interpretation in an ambiguous third-person expression. Before adding it, determine whether the source really points back to the actor; it should not make someone else’s possession into the actor’s own.
Respectful family forms are restricted rather than universal
The Galician lesson lists special respectful possessive forms used with a limited set of nouns, including padre and madre. They are not a general rule for expressing every respectful reference to an owner. A Bosnian formal request involving an ordinary possession should not acquire one of these forms indiscriminately.
This distinction matters when an elder’s relationship to the writer and the tone toward the listener occur in the same message. Calling someone my father identifies a kinship anchor; asking another person politely to contact him expresses an interpersonal relationship with the addressee. A respectful possessive construction cannot replace all the target’s address choices.
The resource also describes the article normally accompanying a prenominal possessive, with exceptions for the special respectful forms and other established uses. A Bosnian noun phrase need not supply a separate article for the Galician phrase to require one.
For this direction, identify the source owner first, construct noun agreement in Galician, and remove third-person ambiguity where it would change the referent. Then assess whether the particular kinship noun licenses a special respectful form. These are construction-specific decisions; a familiar possessive root does not independently settle them.
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