Lower Sorbian to Chhattisgarhi: ownership and number can move out of a source ending
A genitive dual contains two kinds of information
Igartua’s Lower Sorbian study contrasts grod-owu, genitive dual of castles, with grod-ow, genitive plural. That source ending identifies both a grammatical relationship and a number distinction. It cannot be translated accurately by treating every ending-like part as dispensable decoration.
Flueckiger’s fieldwork-based description of Chhattisgarhi illustrates laikaman ke as belonging to the boys. In that expression, plural material and the following relationship expression contribute different information. A Lower Sorbian genitive-dual phrase needs its exact pair retained while using an appropriate target relationship construction.
For an original source note about the belongings of two boys, distinguish the boys’ count from the belongings’ count. Two owners do not imply two items, and several belongings do not expand the source pair into a larger group. The target must preserve the relevant quantities independently.
Do not import another language’s oblique alteration
Flueckiger notes that the Chhattisgarhi noun in her discussed postpositional pattern does not undergo the same oblique alteration found in Hindi. Her singular and plural ownership examples therefore deserve to be read as Chhattisgarhi constructions, rather than corrected automatically toward familiar Hindi morphology.
For a Lower Sorbian source with a clearly inflected owner expression, do not assume that the target owner must reproduce an equally visible case alternation on its stem. The relationship can be expressed by the target postposition. Conversely, dropping both a source ending and the target relationship marker would remove the connection altogether.
This is useful when translating a sentence that contrasts something belonging to the pair with something given to another person. The owner and recipient can be distinct even when both appear in compact noun phrases. Retain the semantic relationship before deciding which target forms realize it.
A shorter possessive still identifies a particular owner
The same fieldwork account records mor and tor for first- and second-person possessive meanings. Their shape differs from forms a reader may know through neighbouring languages. That difference does not make them incomplete replacements for a Lower Sorbian ownership expression.
An original source message contrasting my items with your items must preserve the speaker–addressee distinction, not merely the broad idea of possession. If a target phrase changes its owner while retaining the same object noun, the practical instruction can be reversed. Establish the source owner before interpreting the target possessive.
These Chhattisgarhi observations are scoped to the linguistic setting described by Flueckiger, not presented as an exhaustive contemporary paradigm for every speaker. The exact-pair issue is how a Lower Sorbian ending’s information is redistributed: a pair may need explicit count, a possession relationship may need a postposition, and a personal owner may use a shorter possessive. None of those changes licenses replacing the source’s two owners, particular relationship or speaker reference with a vague general plural.
Language references