Finnish to Romanian: possessive agreement describes the owned noun, not the owner’s gender
Finnish identifies a possessor without masculine or feminine forms
Finnish hän and its genitive hänen do not distinguish a male from a female person. In a possessive expression such as hänen kirjansa, the context identifies whose book is meant; the pronoun itself does not supply the owner’s gender. A Romanian translation should not invent that information merely because its grammar offers gendered personal forms.
The source also distinguishes hänen from plural heidän. Both can accompany a noun with the same third-person possessive suffix. Consequently, the suffix alone does not tell the translator whether there is one owner or several. Read the possessive expression as a whole before selecting the Romanian possessor.
Romanian său and sa do not separate male and female owners
Cojocaru’s Romanian grammar groups său, sa, săi and sale together for a singular third-person possessor, with the form agreeing in gender and number with the noun modified. The contrast among those forms therefore does not by itself identify a man or a woman as owner. This is a different task from identifying the possessed noun’s grammatical properties.
If a Finnish account keeps the same possessor while moving between different possessions, the corresponding Romanian possessive adjective can change form because the owned noun changes. It would be a mistake to infer a new owner from that agreement alone. Conversely, leaving a possessive adjective unchanged across incompatible target nouns would not preserve consistency; it would disregard Romanian agreement.
Lui and ei make a different distinction
The Romanian grammar also presents lui and ei as genitive personal-pronoun alternatives identifying “his” and “her,” while lor expresses a plural possessor. These do not vary to agree with each different owned noun in the same way as the possessive adjectives. Their selection can therefore require information that bare Finnish hänen leaves open.
Where the Finnish passage clearly identifies a particular woman or man, that context can support a gender-specific Romanian form. Where it identifies several owners through heidän, preserve the plural ownership rather than treating multiple possessions as evidence of multiple possessors. One person can own several objects, and several people can share one object; the two counts are independent.
Own possessions also depend on reference within the clause
Cojocaru illustrates a preference for său forms where the possessor is the sentence’s subject, contrasting a person speaking with their own friend against an expression that can refer to another person’s friend. This reference issue is separate from noun agreement. The friend’s grammatical gender cannot establish whose friend is intended.
When interpreting a Finnish possessive report, establish the possessor and whether that person is also the actor in the clause. Then choose Romanian reference and agreement appropriate to that reading. Preserving a gender-neutral source does not mean ignoring the target noun’s gender, and satisfying target agreement does not justify assigning an unsupported gender or number to the owner.
Language references