Bosnian to Greek: matching case names does not preserve every participant role
A source dative can require another target construction
The Bosnian specification distinguishes dative and accusative noun forms, illustrating čovjeku and čovjeka alongside the base noun čovjek. In a source request, such differences help identify the person receiving something and the person or thing directly affected by an action. Modern Greek does not preserve all those relations through a case inventory identical to Bosnian.
The Greek reference distinguishes direct objects in the accusative from indirect-object expressions in the genitive, with prepositional constructions providing additional relations. A Bosnian dative should therefore not be translated by searching for an identically named productive Greek case. Modern Greek dative survives chiefly in fixed inherited expressions.
For a message about sending a colleague a document, first identify the colleague as recipient and the document as the transferred object. The Greek noun phrases must express those roles through the chosen target construction. Similar noun endings or a familiar label such as genitive do not independently establish ownership: the same case category can participate in a different relation.
An initial object does not become the actor
Both source and target use grammatical information beyond word order to establish participant roles. The Greek reference notes flexible ordering and object topicalisation, sometimes with an accompanying object clitic. A target beginning with the document need not describe the document as the sender.
Bosnian case marking can likewise help recover the source relation before rearrangement. If a message foregrounds a particular document, preserve that information organisation without assigning it the action performed by the person. A copied subject-verb-object order is not the only possible correct target, but every ordering must retain the same roles.
This becomes particularly useful when several people are mentioned. A foregrounded possession, its owner and the recipient can all be distinct. Track each referent through the Greek construction instead of assuming that the first noun is the actor and the next person is automatically the owner.
A place statement differs from an existence claim
The Greek reference illustrates είμαι στο σπίτι μου as being at one’s place, and distinguishes existential constructions typically using verbs such as υπάρχω. A Bosnian message saying where an identified person is differs from one saying that a person or service exists at a location.
For a source asking whether a particular colleague is at the office, a target that merely states that there is a colleague there may weaken identification. Conversely, announcing the existence of a service does not necessarily identify an already discussed person. The intended subject and type of claim determine the target predicate.
The reference also analyses στον as a contraction involving a preposition and article. A compact target form may therefore retain a location relation without displaying a separate word for each source element. In this direction, read the Bosnian cases and reference first, then construct Greek recipient, topicalised-object or location expressions as whole units. The goal is to retain the source relationships rather than require matching case names, word counts or visible boundaries.
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