Greek to Basque: case belongs to the whole phrase, but it is not distributed the same way
Do not require every target modifier to copy Greek case agreement
Greek nouns inflect for case, and accompanying adjectives and demonstratives agree with them. A single source noun phrase can therefore contain several visibly inflected words expressing one participant’s grammatical role. Basque organizes this marking differently. Laka’s grammar explains that a case ending at the end of a noun phrase marks the whole phrase; it is not necessary to add the same ending separately to every word inside it.
The Basque examples hamaika pausok and hamaika pausori illustrate ergative and dative forms of eleven steps. The numeral does not separately repeat the case marking. A translation of a longer Greek counted phrase can consequently have fewer visible case endings while retaining its grammatical relationship. Judging correctness by whether each Greek inflection receives a corresponding target suffix would demand a structure Basque does not use.
A Greek subject does not map to one Basque case in every event
The Greek description assigns nominative case to ordinary nominal subjects and accusative to direct objects. Basque requires another analysis of the predicate and its arguments. Laka contrasts an absolutive participant in an arrival clause with an ergative actor in a transitive catching clause. The source nominative ending therefore does not translate through a single invariant target case ending.
This is a role-preservation problem rather than a change of perspective imposed by the translator. A Greek account of a person arriving and a Greek account of that person catching something can use the same broad source subject category. The Basque constructions distinguish those relationships. Identify the target verb’s actual pattern instead of labelling every actor ergative simply because an action takes place, or treating every unmarked target noun as a direct object.
The last word’s ending can represent an earlier noun
Because Basque phrase-final case marks the whole phrase, a suffix on a final modifier is not necessarily a statement about that modifier in isolation. The target needs the original phrase boundary: which descriptive words belong with which noun, and which case role that entire group bears. Greek agreement can help reveal those connections in the source, but the target expresses them without repeating its morphology word for word.
For an original Greek passage describing a particular person, a property of an item and a recipient, keep those three noun phrases distinct before assembling the Basque sentence. Do not attach a recipient relationship to the nearest adjective just because its ending occupies the final position. Nor should a source prepositional phrase be reduced to a copied case label without identifying its meaning. Laka also notes verbs with lexical case requirements and exceptions to a simple transitive–intransitive division. Those restrictions make the chosen Basque predicate important. Preserve the Greek participants and their relations, then mark the completed target phrases according to their construction. A shorter series of endings can encode the same event accurately, while an apparently faithful sequence of copied endings can misassign its roles.
Language references