Bosnian to Romanian: shared case terminology hides different noun forms
Romanian can combine definiteness and case in one noun ending
A Bosnian noun can reveal its role through its case ending. Romanian also has case distinctions, but its nouns frequently combine case information with definiteness. A Romanian ending should therefore not be interpreted as a direct replacement for whichever Bosnian case appears in the source.
The Romanian linguistic overview published in the Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire illustrates omul, the man, omului, to the man, and omule in direct address. The related visible forms perform different jobs. The first does not simply mean an unspecified person; the second belongs to a noun paradigm whose genitive and dative can share their form.
Bosnian čovjeku is a dative example in the MULTEXT-East specification. It can establish a recipient role without independently answering whether the recipient has already been identified. Romanian may require the translator to make that second decision when selecting the target noun phrase.
For a sentence assigning something to a person, preserve both the recipient relationship and the discourse reference. A Bosnian dative ending is not evidence that the Romanian noun should be indefinite, while a definite Romanian form is not evidence that the source named a different participant.
Matching grammatical labels does not produce matching paradigms
The Romanian UD documentation distinguishes nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and vocative, while observing that nouns group nominative with accusative and genitive with dative in their forms. Bosnian specifies seven cases. The different inventories are a warning against translating an ending by its label without examining the phrase.
Bosnian can use a morphological instrumental where Romanian expresses the relationship through a prepositional phrase. The useful question is whether the source participant is a companion, an instrument or another dependent selected by its verb. A single source case can cover relationships requiring different target wording.
Vocative expressions deserve separate treatment. Bosnian gospodine and Romanian omule are both examples involving direct address, but they are not equivalent ways of addressing any recipient. The source title or social description must survive; recognising a vocative ending cannot justify replacing a respectful title with a different noun.
Gender and personal reference are separate from case
Bosnian noun descriptions include masculine, feminine and neuter. Romanian has a category traditionally called neuter whose agreement behaves as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural; UD represents those agreement values rather than a separate neuter feature. A source neuter noun does not license a mechanically parallel target pattern.
In a Bosnian sentence that pluralises an item, the Romanian adjective or determiner must follow the target noun’s agreement behaviour. Source agreement helps identify which words belong together, but it cannot supply the target endings independently of the Romanian lexical choice.
Romanian possessive descriptions also distinguish features of the owner from agreement with the item. This provides a useful point of comparison with Bosnian inflected possession: a changed target ending may reflect the possessed noun rather than a newly identified owner. Preserve the source ownership relationship while allowing Romanian definiteness, case and agreement to be realised together in their own construction.
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