Finnish to Northern Sotho: the possessed noun controls the linking form
Identify what a Finnish possessive suffix refers to
Finnish can identify the owner with a suffix attached to the thing owned. Tiina Nahkola’s teaching material gives kirjani, my book, and explains that such suffixes can follow case endings. When translating into Northern Sotho, separate the noun being described, its role in the sentence and the owner identified by the suffix. They need not occupy equivalent positions in the target phrase.
Third-person possession particularly requires attention to reference. Nahkola distinguishes a possessive suffix referring back to the sentence’s subject from a construction with an explicit third-person possessive pronoun referring to another person. A Finnish account of someone monitoring their own consumption and an account of monitoring another person’s consumption do not describe the same relationship. Resolve that reference before selecting target possessive material. The absence of a separate Finnish word for the owner is not permission to omit ownership from the translation.
The Northern Sotho link agrees with the thing described
Gertrud Faaß describes Northern Sotho possessive concords as linking a possession to its possessor while matching the noun class of the possession. Her examples mosadi wa Piti, Peter’s woman or wife, and leoto la tafola, a table’s leg, contain different linking forms. The difference concerns the noun being linked, not a change between male and female owners. For a Finnish phrase identifying one person’s different belongings, the target linking form can change even when the Finnish owner stays constant. Faaß also notes that these constructions express broader relations than ownership: the table-leg example relates a part to a whole. Thus the translator should not interpret every target possessive construction as a legal claim of property. The grammatical link must fit the chosen target noun and the source relationship, whether that is a family connection, possession or a component of an object.
Plural translation also needs the actual noun’s class pattern
Taljard and de Schryver’s corpus study investigates Northern Sotho singular–plural noun-class pairings rather than assuming that every noun follows a fixed textbook pairing. Its published abstract reports additional pairings involving classes 1/6 and 3/10 and describes the class system as dynamic. This is evidence against treating a single memorised prefix replacement as sufficient for every Finnish plural noun.
The study’s class-pair terminology does not describe the biological gender of the owner. For Finnish-to-Northern Sotho possession phrases, two decisions remain distinct: which noun and number express the belongings, and which forms express who they belong to. A singular-to-plural change can affect the target noun’s agreement environment even when the possessor is unchanged. The corpus finding supports checking the actual noun’s attested pattern; it does not license assigning either newly reported pairing to any noun that looks convenient.
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