Estonian to Persian: distinguish possession in a sentence from a possessive suffix
An Estonian possessor can look like a location
The Estonian language handbook explains that possession is commonly expressed with an adessive possessor and olema, the verb meaning be. Its example Mul on naine ja kaks last states a family relationship. The ending on the possessor does not instruct a Persian translator to place the wife and children physically on a person. The construction as a whole expresses having. Retaining a literal location interpretation would turn a family introduction into a different statement.
The handbook distinguishes this ordinary construction from omama with a subject, which it considers suitable for legal ownership, while preferring the former construction in many other contexts. A Persian translation should not impose that Estonian stylistic distinction by assuming that every target have verb implies legal property. First identify whether the source concerns a family relationship, a personal feature or an owned asset. Those differences belong to the meaning of the possessed expression, even when Estonian packages all of them with a locative-looking possessor.
Persian having does not require literal ownership
Ryan Walter Smith’s study gives ye ketâb dâr-am for having a book and documents the same Persian have verb with family and body-part relationships. The grammatical subject in this target construction is the possessor, unlike the locative-looking Estonian phrase described above. A change in sentence organization is therefore expected. It is not evidence that a translation has changed who possesses the item. The target verb’s person ending helps identify the person associated with it.
Smith also analyzes combinations of the have verb with nouns of mental state, including love, trust and interest. These cannot be interpreted as a list of objects somebody owns. An Estonian statement of an attitude may consequently receive a Persian construction containing have even when the source has a different lexical verb. His examples and judgments primarily come from elicitation with three speakers of colloquial Iranian Persian; they should not be generalized into a single prescription for every Persian variety or register. The practical point is to read the whole predicate before deciding that its possession wording has distorted the source.
The same Persian ending can mark an owner or an affected person
The University of Texas Persian resource contrasts ketābaš, his or her book, with zadaš, a form meaning that someone hit him or her. In the first, the ending is attached to a noun and expresses possession; in the second it is attached to a verb and refers to an object. For translation from Estonian, these are different relationships even though the target ending looks similar. A source possessor must not become the person affected by an unrelated action through a mistaken analysis of the suffix.
The resource also presents possessive suffixes alongside constructions with an independent possessor. This means an Estonian possessive expression need not yield a separate Persian word for every source word. The owner may be represented compactly on the possessed noun instead. Distinguish that noun-phrase relationship from a complete statement that somebody has something: the suffix identifies whose book is mentioned, while a have predicate asserts the relationship in the sentence. Following the host of the suffix and the role of the finite verb keeps those two kinds of possession apart.
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