Danish to Querétaro Otomi: describing colour, size and a change of state
A Danish adjective is not a universal instruction for arranging words
Danish places descriptive adjectives before nouns in expressions such as en rød bil, a red car. Its adjective guidance contrasts this with et rødt hus and several houses described with røde. The changing ending belongs to Danish agreement, rather than to a change from one colour to another. Translating those endings individually would confuse grammatical packaging with the property being described.
Palancar’s primary study analyzes property expressions in San Ildefonso Tultepec Otomi, a Querétaro variety. Under his syntactic analysis, many meanings expressed by Danish adjectives belong to verbs, while another smaller group belongs to nouns. This terminology does not mean that speakers cannot describe colour or size; it identifies how those descriptions fit into sentences.
A Danish noun phrase therefore needs to be interpreted before its word order is transferred. Is the colour selecting which car the customer means, or is the speaker making a new statement about that car? Those two purposes can use the same Danish adjective but require different target structures. A dictionary equivalent for red alone does not settle that choice.
Identifying an object can require a clause
In the studied Otomi variety, property verbs can modify a noun through a following relative clause. Palancar illustrates this with an expression for a hard stick whose structure describes a stick that is hard. A word-for-word copy of Danish adjective placement is consequently not the only, or necessarily the appropriate, way to preserve a compact source description.
Danish also allows an adjective after a linking verb: trøjen er rød describes the sweater, while bæltet er rødt describes the belt. Here Danish still marks agreement on the adjective. In an Otomi property-verb construction, the property itself can serve as the predicate; the Danish linking verb does not automatically require an extra target word meaning is.
For product descriptions, keep the distinction between identifying and asserting. A Danish request for the red item selects among alternatives; a statement that the item is red supplies information. Translating both as disconnected labels can leave the relationship between object and property unclear, even when the colour vocabulary is individually correct.
Being large and becoming large are different messages
Palancar distinguishes a state of being big from a change to that state. His discussion uses a separate growth construction for children becoming big, rather than allowing the relevant property verb to acquire that meaning through ordinary past morphology alone. This is a construction-specific observation, not a rule that every Otomi property expression behaves identically.
Danish descriptions of an earlier size and reports of growth must therefore remain separate in the translation. A supplier describing an object as formerly large is locating a property in time; a parent reporting growth describes a transition. Neither the Danish adjective ending nor a target tense marker can safely stand in for the whole difference.
The same care applies to degree. Danish guidance distinguishes ordinary, comparative and superlative forms, including lang, længere and længst. Decide whether the source states a size, compares two alternatives or selects an extreme before choosing an Otomi construction. Preserving the comparison matters more than retaining the Danish number of words or its adjective category.
Language references