Finnish to Querétaro Otomi: describe a material without inventing a change
A quality can identify an object or make a statement about it
A Finnish workshop note might identify a hard piece of wood and then say that the piece is suitable for a particular task. The quality belongs to the material; it does not necessarily describe something that happened during the work. In Querétaro Otomi, preserve that meaning even when the expression for a quality behaves grammatically like a verb.
A Taste of Finnish distinguishes adjectives accompanying nouns from adjectives used in descriptions. An adjective before a noun shares its case, while its teaching section on descriptions illustrates a statement about a small apartment. These structures serve different purposes: one helps specify a referent, and the other says something about an established referent.
Palancar’s study of San Ildefonso Tultepec Otomi analyzes many property expressions as verbs. His example of bringing a hard stick uses a relative clause modifying the noun, rather than an independently placed adjective. The account concerns a documented Querétaro variety; its scholarly classification should not be mistaken for a claim that speakers cannot describe materials.
Verbal grammar does not automatically mean an event occurred
Imagine a Finnish inventory listing a hard wooden piece among softer materials. The translation should identify the required item. Turning its quality into an assertion that someone hardened it would add a manufacturing process absent from the source. A state, an intentional treatment and a resulting change are three different kinds of information.
Palancar separately illustrates a property verb in a statement about a stick being hard. That example is useful precisely because the target expression can function as a predicate without reporting an action by a craftsperson. Do not insert an agent or a tool merely because the target grammar treats the property word as verbal.
The study also warns against one uniform interpretation of property-verb morphology. In its discussion of becoming big, a change is expressed using a grow construction, while other property expressions behave differently. This supports checking the particular construction rather than assuming that any form labelled past must mean that the material changed its condition.
Keep selection criteria distinct from work instructions
A note selecting a piece because it is hard is not an instruction to make every available piece hard. Likewise, identifying the piece that is already suitable does not establish when it acquired that quality. Preserve a stated time reference, but do not supply an earlier treatment simply to explain why the material now fits the description.
If the Finnish message later reports that the piece became unsuitable after processing, that is additional information about change. Keep it separate from the initial selection criterion. An Otomi version can use a different grammatical structure from the Finnish adjective phrase while preserving the sequence: identify the material, state the relevant quality, and report a later change only when the source actually includes one. This lets the reader distinguish an inventory description from an instruction to alter the object.
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