Greek to Yucatec Maya: father can need a different form when no relative is named
A family relation is not ordinary property
Greek ο πατέρας μου, my father, identifies a family relationship through a noun and a following possessive. Greek ο πατέρας can also identify the father without naming whose father in that phrase. Yucatec Maya can distinguish these uses through the noun’s form, rather than merely adding or removing one counterpart of Greek μου.
Christian Lehmann’s possession study gives in tàatah for my father and le tatah-tsil-o’ for the father in an absolute construction. The extra -tsil is associated with use without a specified possessor. The study’s terminology concerns grammatical relationships; it does not describe fathers as transferable property owned by their children.
Removing my is not always a one-word deletion
Imagine a Greek form asking for details about a parent. One answer might say Ο πατέρας μου εργάζεται εδώ, my father works here. A general instruction could instead refer to ο πατέρας, the father, without placing the relationship inside a first-person phrase. The target noun construction must reflect that difference.
If a translator removes only the target first-person element from a phrase originally meaning my father, the remaining noun may not provide the absolute construction documented in Lehmann’s examples. Greek permits a relatively small visible change here, but the target can require morphology on the relational noun as well.
The presence of -tsil should not then be interpreted as creating a different kind of parent. The family role is unchanged. The contrast concerns whether the noun is presented through an expressed relational link or used without that link in the noun phrase. This is why counting source possessive words is insufficient.
An unexpressed relationship is different from an unknown one
A Greek story can mention my father once and later refer to the father or use a pronoun when the person is already identifiable. Such reference choices do not make the family relationship disappear from the story. The target construction needs to suit the later phrase while preserving which person is being discussed.
Lehmann places kin terms in a subclass that can be used outside a possessive construction with special marking. Other relational nouns in the study cannot be treated identically. The father example therefore does not justify attaching -tsil to every noun translated from a Greek phrase lacking μου, σου, or another possessor.
The study also distinguishes a house from a home and explicitly rejects treating those words as simple interchangeable possessed and unpossessed versions. That warning is relevant to family descriptions: grammatical relation and lexical meaning must be kept separate. Choosing a more relational word can change what is named, not merely supply a missing owner.
For a Greek text about relatives, first identify whether the phrase names a family role in general, identifies somebody through their relation to a participant, or resumes a person already mentioned. Then select the Yucatec construction supported for that particular kin term. The cited forms are Lehmann’s analytical orthography, including tone marks and apostrophes, rather than a claim that every local writing convention reproduces the same notation.
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