Lower Sorbian to Literary Chinese: reference comes from constructions rather than matching endings
One target character can have several grammatical functions
The introductory Classical Chinese textbook explains 之 as a possessive or attributive link, an object pronoun, and, less commonly, a verb of going. It gives 子之聲 for your voice and 東之人 for people of the East. A Lower Sorbian possession or descriptive phrase cannot therefore be evaluated by searching for a single character and assuming it always means the same relationship.
This is particularly useful when the source combines a person’s possession with an action involving another participant. A target 之 functioning as an object pronoun does not itself introduce a new owner. Conversely, an attributive link need not replace a source personal object. Identify the target construction around the character before deciding which source relationship it expresses. The examples demonstrate different functions, not freely interchangeable translations of one source word.
A third-person expression may resume a reference rather than name a new person
Eno’s literary-language primer describes 其 both as a subordinating possessive-like pronoun and as an expression resuming a recent antecedent. His grammar notes also emphasize frequent omission of explicit subjects in Literary Chinese. These observations explain why a concise target sentence may rely on reference established earlier rather than repeat each Lower Sorbian personal expression.
The possibility of omission does not establish which participant was intended. A Lower Sorbian source can distinguish a subject’s own property through swoj, while Stone notes ambiguity with certain nonreflexive possessive forms. If a passage mentions two people and then an item belonging to one of them, preserve that distinction instead of expecting a compact Literary Chinese expression to resolve an unclear original automatically.
Likewise, do not interpret every occurrence of 其 as an independent assertion about somebody’s property. Eno’s glossary identifies another use suggesting likelihood or desirability before a verb. The surrounding syntax is needed to distinguish reference to an owner from a different grammatical function. A character-by-character gloss cannot make that decision reliably.
Source agreement can identify a relationship without requiring a target ending
Stone’s Lower Sorbian examples mam dweju konjowu and mam dweju wucabnikowu describe having two horses and two teachers. The animate dual objects share their form with the genitive dual. This is source object morphology, not a reason to add an ownership phrase to the Literary Chinese translation. The target still needs the intended count and object, but it need not reproduce that inflectional packaging.
The Classical Chinese textbook also treats many property words as stative verbs, rather than as adjectives requiring an additional be in a predicate. A Lower Sorbian description whose adjective participates in agreement can consequently require a different grammatical analysis in the target. Preserve what property is asserted of which participant before judging whether an ending or separate linking verb has disappeared.
The selected target is Literary Chinese. Familiar modern character meanings and modern sentence habits are not sufficient tests of its constructions. Read the resulting proposition and its reference links together: a compact expression must still distinguish the owner, object and actor supplied by the Lower Sorbian source.
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