Lower Sorbian to Hausa: a possessive-looking form may be the person being sought
Preserve the object inside a purpose construction
Arkadiev’s comparison gives a Lower Sorbian example of going tomorrow to look for Lenka, with the name marked accusative inside the supine construction. That grammatical relationship identifies the person sought. It does not say that Lenka owns the search or that she is doing the travelling.
Hausa can package a related object relationship differently when an action is presented in the continuative. UCLA’s grammar describes non-wa verbal nouns that require a genitive linker before a noun object and possessive forms for pronoun objects. A target expression that looks possession-like can therefore still describe an action directed toward a person.
For an original Lower Sorbian report that people are looking for the addressee, keep that person as the object of the search. A Hausa possessive-looking ending must not automatically be interpreted as your search, meaning a search performed by the addressee. The target construction can assign it another grammatical function.
A changed object expression need not change the search event
The UCLA course contrasts Sun neme ka with Suna nemanka in its discussion of searching for you. The target changes both the tense–aspect expression and how the pronominal object is packaged. Recognizing only the search stem is insufficient to establish whether the result reports the intended event or an ongoing search.
This is useful when a Lower Sorbian message updates an earlier plan to look for somebody. A future intention to begin searching and a report that the search is now in progress are different claims. A fluent Hausa continuative would be misleading if the source only announced tomorrow’s plan.
Conversely, a source report of an ongoing search should not be reduced to a bare plan merely because the speaker also mentions why the search began. Preserve the main time–aspect assertion and then identify the target object inside that assertion. Neither one can be recovered from the person’s name alone.
The verbal-noun pattern is not universal across Hausa verbs
UCLA distinguishes wa and non-wa verbal nouns and notes that their object patterns differ. Its continuative examples do not license adding the same linker or possessive ending mechanically to every Hausa action word. The selected verb’s construction determines the form.
For an original Lower Sorbian passage about looking for someone and then helping them, each action still requires its own target expression. A matching person reference does not require the two predicates to have identical shapes. The course also distinguishes direct from indirect objects in continuative constructions, so a recipient or beneficiary should not be forced into the searched-person pattern.
The exact-pair difficulty is recognizing the same participant role across different grammatical packaging. Lower Sorbian can identify the sought person through an accusative form in a purpose clause. Hausa can express an object through a possession-like construction associated with its verbal noun. Interpret that form within the selected predicate and aspect pattern, rather than treating its familiar possessive appearance as evidence of ownership.
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