Catalan to Slovak: unchanged jeho can still accompany a changing noun
Catalan possessive endings follow the possessed noun
In Catalan, tonic possessives agree in gender and number with the noun they accompany. The IEC lists seu, seva, seus, and seves within that system. A passage can therefore change the possessive form when it moves from one possession to several, even while continuing to describe the same owner.
This is an important starting point for Slovak because its possessive expressions do not all behave alike. The Slovake.eu grammar distinguishes declining first- and second-person possessives from the unchanged third-person forms jeho, jej, and ich. Expecting every Slovak possessive to acquire an ending parallel to Catalan can introduce an error.
For example, a Catalan inventory might describe one person’s house and then several houses belonging to that same person. The number of possessions has changed; the number of owners need not have changed. A Slovak possessive that remains unchanged is not, by itself, evidence that the plural meaning was lost. Check the noun phrase rather than requiring every word to display the same change.
An unchanged form does not make the whole phrase uninflected
Slovake.eu illustrates jeho dom, jeho domu, and jeho domy. The possessive remains jeho while the noun changes. It also lists jej and ich as unchanged across gender, number, and case. These patterns contrast with its examples in which a second-person possessive changes along with the accompanying noun.
A Catalan message about visiting a house, discussing a house, and several houses can require different target noun forms. Keeping the third-person possessive unchanged does not license copying the rest of the phrase without checking its role. Conversely, changing the possessive just because the noun changes would misapply the behavior of another possessive series.
This distinction is useful when revising a list or adapting a sentence into a reply. Replacing the owner named by I with an owner named by he does more than substitute a dictionary headword. The resulting possessive may belong to a different inflectional pattern, even though both phrases express ownership.
Svoj adds a separate question about who owns the object
Slovak also has the reflexive possessive svoj, which the teaching grammar illustrates through a person lending that person’s own book. Its contrast with a third-person possessive can distinguish the lender’s book from another person’s book. Svoj itself has declining forms; it should not be grouped with unchanged jeho merely because both can appear in a third-person narrative.
For a Catalan passage saying that a man lends his book, resolve whether the book belongs to the lender or another previously mentioned man. The source possessive’s masculine ending follows the book noun; it does not independently answer that ownership question. The surrounding account must establish the relation.
In this direction, make two decisions separately: whose possession the source describes, and how the chosen Slovak possessive behaves in its noun phrase. An ending that looks consistent with Catalan can still select the wrong owner, while an unchanged Slovak form can be entirely compatible with accurate number and case marking elsewhere.
Language references