Catalan to Pashto: an adjective’s changing stem can preserve the same description
Gender agreement need not leave the stem unchanged
Catalan adjective pairs such as verd and verda make agreement visible, while adjectives such as útil do not change for gender. Pashto also has adjective inflection, but David’s grammar documents classes in which the internal stem changes as well as the ending. Recognizing the dictionary form alone is therefore insufficient.
Her General Pashto table for hot gives tod as a masculine singular direct form, with tawd- appearing in other forms. This is not automatically a different temperature word. A Catalan description that keeps the same quality while changing its noun can produce a larger-looking target change than a reader expects from adding a feminine ending.
A food description should not be corrected back to the dictionary form
David similarly illustrates cooked or ripe with pox and inflected forms containing pāx- or pax-. The relevant pattern belongs to the adjective’s inflectional class. It does not license replacing every vowel in every Pashto adjective according to one universal rule.
Consider an original Catalan menu note that describes a cooked ingredient, then refers to a different cooked ingredient. If the target nouns require different adjective forms, their surface descriptions may no longer match letter for letter. Restoring pox everywhere could remove agreement rather than standardize terminology. Conversely, a source contrast between raw and cooked must remain a lexical contrast; it should not be dismissed as another harmless change of stem.
The target noun controls the target form
Catalan and Pashto both distinguish grammatical gender, but knowing the source noun’s gender does not establish the gender of its translated equivalent. David’s tables also distinguish direct and oblique environments, so gender alone cannot explain every target adjective ending.
A Catalan sentence describing a hot item as a subject and a later phrase referring to that same item in another construction can require different Pashto forms. The item has not changed identity and the adjective need not indicate hotter or colder. Determine the target noun and the phrase’s grammatical environment before deciding that the changed form mistranslates the source quality. The source’s feminine ending cannot simply be converted into one permanent Pashto ending for that item.
Keep the quality separate from a command to create it
David’s verb discussion separately records tawd-edəl for becoming warm and tawd-awəl for making something warm. Those are changes of state or actions, whereas the adjective table describes a quality. A similar stem across these entries does not make them interchangeable grammatical answers.
An original Catalan note saying that food is hot reports its present condition. A request to warm the food asks for an action, and a statement that it became warm reports a change. Preserve that distinction before examining agreement. Otherwise a reader concentrating only on the recognizable temperature stem may accept an instruction where the source merely described the meal, or a description where someone was actually asked to heat it. The target stem’s familiarity is useful evidence, but its construction establishes the message.
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