Czech to Bosnian: familiar possessive relations still need target inflection
Czech invariant jeho does not mean an invariant Bosnian possessive
Closely related grammatical ideas can still have different inflection in Czech and Bosnian. Czech jeho is an invariant possessive in the academy dictionary, whereas Bosnian possessive forms vary with the noun phrase. A translator cannot preserve a source possessive’s unchanged spelling as a rule for the target.
The MULTEXT-East Bosnian specification records njegova as a feminine singular nominative form of njegov and njegovoj as a feminine singular dative form. These forms keep the same possessive base while changing grammatical agreement and case. Their different endings do not mean that the owner has changed.
For a Czech reference to his possession followed by a phrase involving that possession in another role, Bosnian may consequently change the possessive form even when Czech retains jeho. Evaluate the target phrase’s case and noun agreement rather than asking whether every repeated source possessive received an identical target spelling.
Separate the possessor’s identity from the possession’s agreement
The Czech dictionary distinguishes jeho from její and jejich by owner reference. It also notes that její declines while jeho and jejich do not. Source variation therefore comes from two different dimensions: which owner is meant and what inflection the particular possessive permits.
The Bosnian specification places different possessive bases within the same feminine singular agreement categories. A feminine possessive ending can thus concern the possessed noun’s grammar rather than identify a woman as owner. The owner meaning belongs to the selected base and the discourse reference, not to that ending alone.
This distinction is useful when a Czech paragraph discusses a man and a woman with their separate documents or possessions. Retaining the correct person while selecting the wrong target agreement form is a grammatical error; selecting a different person to make an ending look familiar is a meaning error. The translation needs both relationships resolved.
Reflexive possession transfers the relation, not every source ending
Czech svůj links possession to the subject or relevant actor, according to the academy dictionary. Bosnian also has svoj, described in Unbabel’s own Bosnian language guidelines as a possessive referring to the sentence’s subject. This shared relationship is useful, but the inflected forms must still fit the target noun phrase.
The Bosnian specification records svog and svojeg among masculine singular animate accusative forms of svoj. Their shape differs from Czech reflexive possessive forms even though the ownership relation is comparable. Similar dictionary headwords are therefore not instructions to reuse the Czech case ending.
In a Czech statement about someone taking their own belongings, identify the actor as owner before constructing Bosnian agreement. If another person’s property is intended, do not select the reflexive merely because its spelling resembles the source vocabulary. The shared grammatical concept helps preserve reference, while the target paradigm determines the forms that express it. The corpus specification supplies morphological evidence, not a claim that every regional variant is equally preferred in every Bosnian context.
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