German to Upper Sorbian: two owners are not the same as two possessions
German unser can conceal the size of the owning group
German IDS guidance identifies unser as relating an item to the speaker’s group. Its visible ending then follows the possessed noun’s case, number and gender. The word therefore supplies ownership information and agreement information, but it does not separately mark a grammatical dual for exactly two owners.
The scholarly Upper Sorbian course distinguishes naju, waju and jeju for possessions associated with two owners in the first, second and third persons. Its possessive tables explicitly separate the number of the possessor from singular, plural and dual forms referring to possessions. Two people owning one item and one person owning two items are different grammatical problems.
For a German statement about our home, establish whether the speaker means a couple or a larger household. If the source explicitly identifies two owners, preserve that information when choosing the Upper Sorbian ownership expression. Do not choose a dual possessor merely because the noun describes a pair of objects.
A noun ending and an owner expression can answer different questions
The Upper Sorbian course’s noun tables give noha, nohi and noze in the nominative for singular, plural and dual, and polo, pola and poli for field. These illustrate that exactly two referents can participate in a separate grammatical number pattern rather than simply using the ordinary plural form.
German distinguishes singular and plural in the noun phrase, while an explicit numeral or a phrase identifying both items can specify two. In translation, that explicit quantity needs to be interpreted before the target noun form is selected. A German plural by itself does not establish whether there are two items or more than two.
For a German description of jointly held land, count the owners and the fields independently. A source can discuss two owners and several fields, several owners and two fields, or two of each. Treating every mention of two as if it controlled the whole phrase can distort which group is dual and which group is not.
Similar-looking possessives do not guarantee the same grammatical function
The course also gives mój as a first-person dual subject pronoun and lists a possessive mój in the singular-possessor paradigm. The matching spelling occurs in different grammatical roles. Its meaning cannot be determined from resemblance to German mein or from a dictionary lookup without the surrounding construction.
German itself separates an independent personal pronoun such as wir from a possessive article such as unser. When reading the Upper Sorbian result, locate whether the relevant form identifies an acting group or modifies a noun as a possessive. An isolated string comparison can mistake a correct subject form for a claim about ownership.
The practical distinction is who acts, who owns and how many things are involved. German distributes these clues across pronouns, possessive stems, endings and explicit quantity expressions. Upper Sorbian offers a grammatical dual in the relevant paradigms. Use the source’s actual participant and item counts to choose among those forms, rather than inventing a pair or collapsing a clearly stated pair into an unspecified larger group.
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