Greek to Persian: preserve the owner while rebuilding the possessive phrase
Greek distinguishes two kinds of information inside possession
The Centre for the Greek Language distinguishes a weak possessive construction from an emphatic one using δικός with a genitive pronoun. Its example το βιβλίο της identifies a book through its female possessor. The book’s grammatical gender and the owner information carried by the possessive are separate: the neuter noun does not make the owner a neuter entity.
The emphatic possessive adds another layer. The Centre presents δικός μου, δική μου and δικό μου as forms of an inflecting expression, alongside the unchanged first-person element. When translating into Persian, those Greek changes should not become three different owners. Identify the possessed item and the emphasis before deciding how the target expresses the relation.
This distinction helps with a correction about belongings. A Greek speaker can contrast their own object with somebody else’s through the possessive construction. Preserve the correction or contrast rather than interpreting every grammatical ending as a separate lexical property. The owner’s identity and the item being contrasted must remain recoverable even when Persian uses different morphology.
Persian can identify the same possession without marking the owner’s gender
The University of Texas Persian resources give ketābaš for a book belonging to a third person, without distinguishing his from her. Thus the female-owner information in the Greek book example need not appear as a gender distinction in the target suffix. That is a difference in grammatical encoding, not evidence that the target refers to a male person.
The same resource distinguishes a noun carrying an attached possessive ending from an independent belonging expression. It gives māl-e man for mine and uses that pattern in a house ownership sentence. A Greek possessive standing independently should therefore be interpreted by its function in the sentence, rather than translated as an isolated adjective with a guessed Persian gender ending.
The teaching material also warns that the belonging construction is inappropriate for identifying family members. A Greek statement identifying a relative and a statement claiming ownership of a house require different target treatment, even if both source phrases contain a possessive. Retain the relationship to the relative instead of turning that person into somebody’s property.
An unprinted connecting vowel can still organize the Persian phrase
Simin Abrahams’s Modern Persian describes ezafe as a link joining a possessed noun to its following possessor. It also joins a noun to following adjectives. The book explains that this connector is usually not visibly marked in ordinary Persian writing, although it remains part of pronunciation and grammatical interpretation.
For a Greek noun phrase combining a description and an owner, lack of a visible connector in the target script is therefore not sufficient grounds to insert an extra word meaning of. Persian can express the relationship through an ezafe construction whose organization is not fully displayed by separate written words.
Abrahams also illustrates how the link continues through a sequence of adjectives, rather than appearing only once at the beginning. This matters when a Greek description has several modifiers: preserve which qualities describe the item and which expression identifies its owner. Rebuilding that relationship gives the target a coherent noun phrase without treating Greek agreement endings as a list of additional meanings.
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