Catalan to Tigrinya: the possessed person can control agreement
A Catalan have statement need not remain a have verb
Catalan tinc identifies a first-person singular possessor through the verb tenir. In Bulakh’s description of Tigrinya predicative possession, a locative copular construction instead indexes the possessed entity with subject agreement and the possessor with an object index.
Her example ʔanə ħafti ʔallatɨ-nni means I have a sister. The feminine singular agreement belongs to the sister, while the first-person object index identifies the person who has that sister. A Catalan reader should not interpret this distribution as a change from I to she as the owner. The two languages package the same possession relationship differently.
The speaker’s gender does not determine every target ending
Consider an original Catalan introduction saying that the speaker has a sister and later mentioning another relative. The source tinc remains first person regardless of the relative’s grammatical gender. A Tigrinya possession predicate can change agreement when the possessed entity changes, even though the speaker remains the same.
Correcting that agreement solely to match the person typing the message could reverse the relationship between owner and possessed entity. First identify which relative is being introduced. Then distinguish the index that refers to that relative from the one referring to the speaker. The meaningful correspondence is between participants, not between the visible first-person shape of tinc and every target verbal element.
A possessive phrase contains another kind of agreement decision
CPNL explains that Catalan seu, seva, seus, and seves agree with what is possessed, rather than directly spelling out a male or female owner. The forms can also refer to different possessor persons in context. A detached seva therefore cannot establish that the owner is female.
When an introduction shifts from I have a sister to a description involving her home, the source construction has changed. The first statement establishes a possession relation through a predicate; the second uses a possessive inside a noun phrase. The Tigrinya translation should preserve the actual owner recovered from the conversation rather than carry the source possessed noun’s feminine agreement over as a universal clue about that owner.
Not having something is not simply a negative existence report
Bulakh distinguishes a negative existential copula from a special negative possessive copula. Her account therefore does not support negating every Tigrinya possession statement merely by selecting whichever negative existence expression looks shortest.
A Catalan message can deny that a particular person has something while leaving its existence elsewhere entirely open. Saying that a room is unavailable to the speaker does not establish that no room exists in the building. Likewise, denying a family relationship is different from denying the existence of that kind of relative anywhere. Preserve the source possessor when moving from tinc to no tinc: the target construction must deny the relationship at issue, rather than accidentally broaden the denial into a statement that the possessed entity does not exist.
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