Bosnian to Irish: an owner can change the beginning of the following word
A small h can distinguish whose relative is meant
Bosnian possessive expressions distinguish the relationship between an owner and a noun through their own inflected forms. Irish can make an ownership distinction through the initial shape of the following word as well as through the short possessive itself. A target that appears to differ by one letter can identify a different owner.
Teanglann contrasts a athair, his father, with a hathair, her father. The relative remains father, while the owner changes. A Bosnian source explicitly referring to a woman’s father should not be translated with the first expression merely because both contain the same base kinship noun.
This differs from agreement with the possessed noun. A masculine relative can belong to a relationship anchored to a woman. The target’s added h in this example identifies that anchor; it does not make the father female. Keep the owner’s identity separate from the person described by the kinship noun.
The same written possessive can also have plural ownership
The Irish dictionary additionally gives a dtithe for their houses. The initial change and the noun’s form work with the possessive to establish the intended reading. The small word a alone cannot be assigned permanently to one English or Bosnian owner expression.
For a Bosnian message listing a person’s father and a group’s houses, inspect each complete Irish phrase. The number of houses is different from the number of owners. A plural possession does not establish group ownership, and a group can jointly possess one item.
The Bosnian specification records gender, number and case in possessive paradigms. Those source endings can help identify which noun a possessive accompanies. Irish may distribute comparable information across a short possessive and an initial mutation instead of reproducing the source ending. The full target phrase, rather than the final letters alone, carries the relationship.
An apparent possessive can refer to the person affected by an action
Teanglann also describes a used with a verbal noun to express a pronominal object. Its listed forms a chur, a cur and a gcur distinguish sending him, her or them in the illustrated construction. The associated initial patterns do not always introduce ownership of an ordinary noun.
Bosnian accusative forms can identify an affected participant, as the specification illustrates with čovjeka. When a source describes someone being sent somewhere, an Irish verbal-noun construction can use personal material resembling possession without saying that the person owns the action.
This is useful when a message contains both a relative and a request involving that relative. First distinguish whose relative is named from who is sent or helped. A target initial change may identify the owner in one phrase and the object of an action in another. Reading every a as ordinary possession would collapse those roles.
For this direction, recover the Bosnian owner and participant cases before checking the Irish word beginnings. An h or an eclipsing consonant can preserve a consequential personal distinction. Treating it as optional spelling, or evaluating the possessive without its following word, can change the person the source means.
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