Czech to Dari: deciding what an adjective describes inside a linked phrase
An adjective’s relationship can move into word order
Czech agreement can identify how a descriptive word relates to a noun through gender, number and case. The Czech Language Institute includes attributive adjectives in its discussion of agreement, alongside participles and predicates. Those endings give source-language evidence about which expression is being described. When a Czech noun phrase contains more than one possible referent, interpret that relationship before reorganizing it into Dari.
Baker’s learner grammar joins Dari nouns and adjectives through ezafa and places an adjective after the noun it describes. It contrasts an apple belonging to a big boy with a big apple belonging to a boy. The sequence changes which noun has the size property. A translation can therefore retain every broad content word and still attach the description to the wrong participant.
A source agreement ending does not become a target adjective ending
The Czech Institute explains singular feminine and neuter predicate endings as well as the different plural agreement patterns. Grammatical gender need not match biological sex: feminine words for personalities or celebrities can include male referents. A Czech descriptive ending must be interpreted with its noun, rather than turned into an independent assertion that the person described is female.
Baker notes that a Dari adjective does not change according to whether its noun is singular or plural; the ezafa follows the plural form. That differs from the source agreement system. Preserve the number of things and the quality attributed to them, while allowing the target adjective to remain unchanged. An invariant adjective is not evidence that a Czech plural was mistranslated as a singular.
Named ownership and descriptive modification must remain distinct
Naughton illustrates Czech genitive noun phrases with jméno autora, the author’s name. He also distinguishes possessive adjectives from ordinary genitive dependents. These source constructions encode a relationship between two expressions even though no separate word for of appears. A target link must preserve which expression names the main item and which identifies its possessor, rather than simply place the same dictionary nouns next to each other.
The Dari grammar illustrates seb-ɛ ahmad for Ahmad’s apple and seb-ɛ sʊrx for a red apple. Ezafa can participate in both patterns, but ownership and a descriptive quality remain different meanings. In a longer Czech phrase, establish whether a modifier describes the item, its owner or another embedded noun before selecting the Dari sequence. This is particularly useful for labels and captions: their brevity leaves little surrounding context to repair an attachment mistake. These examples follow Baker’s Dari transcription rather than substituting Iranian Persian pronunciation.
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