Bosnian to Tigrinya: follow both possession roles through the target construction
Having something can put its features on the predicate
Bosnian can express possession through a form of imati with an object. Tigrinya uses a locative copular construction in which the possessed item and the possessor correspond to different indexes on the predicate. A source subject does not necessarily remain the participant controlling every target agreement feature.
Maria Bulakh illustrates ʔanə ħafti ʔallatɨ-nni, I have a sister. Her analysis identifies the predicate’s subject index with the sister and its object index with the possessor. The construction still expresses first-person possession; it has not changed the source owner into the sister.
A Bosnian reader accustomed to agreement with the subject must therefore separate semantic ownership from the target agreement relationship. If the original says that the writer has a sister, feminine agreement in part of the Tigrinya predicate can concern the sister rather than establish that the writer is female.
In a source sentence containing several family members, this distinction becomes particularly useful. The owner, the family relation and the relevant agreement controller must remain distinct. A target that preserves the family noun but attaches possession to a different person has changed the statement even if its agreement is internally plausible.
A negative possession statement has a specialised construction
Bulakh gives ʔanə səbəjti yəbɨlləjɨn, I have no wife, and describes a special negative possessive copula. The negative is not obtained merely by appending a universal negative word to the positive example. The target choice belongs to the possession construction.
Bosnian negative possession and negative identification should consequently be distinguished before translation. Saying that someone does not have a particular family relation is different from saying that a particular person is not that relative. The sentences can contain similar personal nouns while asserting different relationships.
Where the source denies ownership of an item, preserve that denial rather than converting it into a claim that the item does not exist anywhere. Tigrinya relates existence and possession through locative constructions, but the possessor index is consequential. Leaving out the owner can broaden the source statement beyond its intended scope.
A genitive expression can contain more than a fixed noun order
For possession inside a noun phrase, Bulakh documents a construction with the genitive marker nay that permits either head-dependent or dependent-head order. She also illustrates modern spoken nay jowhannɨs ʕabbaj-u, Yohannes’s grandmother, with an additional possessive marker referring to the owner.
Bosnian possessive expressions can likewise require distinguishing the owner from agreement with the possessed noun. The specification includes reflexive svoj, whose interpretation depends on the source relationship. A Tigrinya possessive marker that refers to a male owner must not be mistaken for evidence that the possessed family member is male.
If a Bosnian phrase describes one participant’s grandmother, the target needs to retain that participant as owner even when the noun phrase is rearranged or its possession is marked twice. Neither a different noun order nor additional target marking independently introduces another relative. The useful comparison is between the source ownership relation and the complete Tigrinya construction, not a one-to-one match between word positions or gender-looking endings.
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