Greek to Norwegian: retaining the comparison while changing adjective form
Greek agreement need not appear on a Norwegian comparative
Greek adjectives agree with nouns in gender, number and case, including when they function as predicates. A description comparing several people can therefore carry agreement information which differs from a description of one person. Norwegian comparative adjectives, as explained in NTNU’s Norwegian on the Web, do not change with the gender or number of the noun. The comparison survives even when those source endings disappear.
NTNU illustrates yngre in comparisons involving a man, a woman and two people together. Its unchanged form does not make the plural subject singular. In a Greek-to-Norwegian message, establish who is being compared through the participants and sentence structure rather than expecting the target comparative adjective to reproduce the Greek agreement chain.
Ranking something is different from saying it has a quality
Greek distinguishes an ordinary quality, a comparison and a superlative interpretation. Its relative superlative can combine a definite article with a comparative form. That structure must be interpreted before translating: a definite phrase identifying the oldest person is not simply a claim that someone is old, and a comparison with one named person need not rank the whole group.
Norwegian has its own forms and constructions for these meanings. The NTNU lesson gives gammel, eldre and eldst for old, older and oldest. The change of root shape is a useful warning against generating the target form mechanically from the ordinary adjective. Greek morphology may help establish the intended degree, but the Norwegian lexical paradigm supplies the form expressing it.
The grammatical position can change the visible ending
A superlative inside a definite Norwegian noun phrase uses a different arrangement from a bare predicative superlative. NTNU’s det fineste huset identifies the nicest house. The adjective has an ending and appears with a definite determiner and definite noun. A Greek article plus ranked adjective cannot be rendered by preserving just the article’s position while ignoring the target noun phrase.
This matters in a message selecting one property from several. A statement that one house is nicer than another supplies a comparison, whereas a phrase selecting the nicest house identifies a member of a comparison set. Converting one into the other can change the instruction: the source might establish only that a house outranks one alternative, not that it outranks every available house.
NTNU also teaches the superlative when comparing two alternatives, illustrating choices between two people, jackets or cities. Such a target form does not by itself prove that the original Greek message compared a large set. The explicitly named alternatives still determine the scope. Avoid expanding a two-way choice into a claim about a whole town or family merely because the Norwegian form is called superlative.
The useful distinction is between meaning and agreement. Recover the people or things compared, the property and the comparison set from Greek. Then choose the Norwegian degree form and noun-phrase construction. A missing Greek-style gender ending can be normal target grammar, while a changed comparison set is a substantive change to what the message says.
Language references