German to Faroese: an inflected past participle belongs to a particular construction
German gender can appear on a descriptive participle
German finite verbs do not inflect for gender, but participles used in appropriate descriptive environments can. The German treebank documentation separates these properties rather than treating every verb-shaped word alike. A German text can therefore contain both a compound predicate reporting what happened and a participial description identifying an item. Their grammar should not be transferred into Faroese as though they required one interchangeable form.
The Faroese documentation distinguishes a supine selected by hava from past participles that can inflect for gender, number, and case. A target form used after a perfect auxiliary does not have to look like a descriptive form accompanying a noun. A German reader should identify the target construction before deciding that a Faroese ending has been omitted or added incorrectly.
Reporting a repair differs from identifying the repaired object
Consider the German meanings “They have repaired the windows” and “The repaired windows are upstairs.” The first reports an event; the second uses the result to identify which windows are meant. The identity and number of the windows stay constant, but their grammatical environment changes. Faroese has to express each environment with the appropriate verb form and noun-related agreement.
This matters when a German maintenance report moves from an action sentence to an inventory description. Copying the target supine unchanged into every later descriptive phrase can ignore participial agreement. Replacing every target perfect form with an agreeing adjective-like form can make the opposite error. The desired comparison is not whether one German participle has been spelled the same way throughout, but whether the Faroese construction correctly reports the action or identifies the resulting item.
Case on a participle is different from person on an auxiliary
The Faroese account specifically lists nominative and accusative among the past participle’s inflectional possibilities. It separately describes finite verb distinctions for person and number. A change in a target ending can therefore reflect which noun phrase the participle agrees with, rather than a new time reference or a different speaker. German’s own four-case system makes the idea of case familiar, but does not predict every Faroese ending.
The same Faroese source also distinguishes auxiliaries that select a verbal past participle from hava selecting the supine. Thus “has repaired,” “was repaired,” and “the repaired window” should not be collapsed into one target pattern just because all concern repair. German can use haben, werden, and a descriptive participle to organize these relations. The Faroese sentence must be assembled according to its own auxiliary and agreement requirements. Keep the actor where one is expressed, the affected window or windows, and the event-versus-description distinction. Only then is it meaningful to compare target forms; isolated participles do not encode the entire source proposition.
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