Lower Sorbian to Galician: two owners do not automatically receive one item each
Keep a pair distinct from a distribution
Lower Sorbian has an active dual category, as the DOBES overview explains. A source expression can therefore identify exactly two people without a separate numeral. That grammatical pair does not, by itself, state how possessions or supplied items are divided between them.
Xunta de Galicia’s teaching reference describes cadanseu and related forms as distributive possessives, meaning an item for each participant. Its bicycle example makes distribution part of the expression. A Galician translation must not introduce that per-person allocation merely because the Lower Sorbian owners form a pair.
For an original Lower Sorbian arrangement about two visitors and their bicycle, determine whether they share one bicycle, have separate bicycles or have an unspecified number. Two visitors are compatible with several allocations. A target distributive form can make a precise claim that an ordinary source dual did not make.
The item controls one kind of agreement
The Galician reference distinguishes cadanseu, cadanseus, cadansúa and cadansúas and places the distributive expression before the possessed item. It separately explains ordinary possessive agreement with the possessed noun rather than the possessor. Those facts make the item’s gender and number important without turning them into a count of owners.
For an original source statement about a pair of children each receiving a ball, the pair and the one-each distribution are both relevant. Preserve the two children while selecting the Galician expression appropriate to the ball phrase. A plural-looking possessed-item form cannot be used as a shortcut for identifying two recipients.
Conversely, a reference to two people’s belongings may contain several items without specifying one equal share per person. A target that adds distributive meaning changes the arrangement even if it retains both owners and an appropriate plural noun. Ask whether equal individual allocation is asserted before choosing a distributive construction.
A regular third-person possessive can leave owner number open
The same Galician resource warns that seu forms can refer to singular or plural owners and discusses explicit de-plus-pronoun expressions for clarity. Thus a source Lower Sorbian dual can become less transparent if the target relies solely on an ordinary third-person possessive.
For an original report that the two visitors collected their documents, preserve that the documents belong to the same pair already introduced. An appropriate preceding reference can make the owners recoverable; the possessive’s ending alone cannot guarantee it. The target should not let the pair disappear into an unspecified third-person owner.
This direction requires keeping three quantities apart: the number of owners, the number of items, and the allocation of those items. Lower Sorbian dual morphology supplies the first kind of information in relevant forms. Galician possessive agreement concerns the item, while distributive forms add an each-participant relationship. Preserve the source’s actual combination instead of using any one of those grammatical signals as a replacement for all three.
Language references