Lower Sorbian to Northern Kurdish: rebuild the owner chain around the possessed noun
The source can turn an owner into an adjective
Stone describes a strong Sorbian preference for possessive adjectives, while noting a specific Lower Sorbian restriction when the owner has a modifier. His Lower Sorbian example našogo nana dom expresses our or my father’s house through a genitive phrase before the head noun. The source therefore needs to be read as a dependency chain, not merely a row of modifiers attached to house.
Thackston describes a different organization in Kurmanji: the possessed or otherwise limited noun comes first in a construct, followed by its limiter. Translating the Lower Sorbian phrase can consequently move the owner information after the possessed item. Retaining the source order would not preserve the target construction merely because all the relevant nouns were present.
Distinguish the item, its owner and the owner’s modifier
In the Lower Sorbian father’s-house expression, father is the owner of the house, while the preceding first-person expression identifies the father’s relationship to the speaker. It does not say that the speaker and father separately own two houses. A target must keep those levels distinct even if their word order changes.
Thackston illustrates a Kurmanji chain with kitêbên kurê wî mirovî, that man’s son’s books. This provides a concrete comparison for nested ownership. The books, the son and the man occupy different levels; replacing the chain with a flat list changes the relationships. A Lower Sorbian owner phrase containing a family relation requires the same attention to which expression limits which noun.
The target linking ending belongs to the head it connects
The Kurmanji primary construct has different singular endings for masculine and feminine nouns and a shared plural ending. Thackston illustrates kitêba nû and kitêbên nû for the new book and new books. The adjective nû remains unchanged while the noun’s linking form changes.
A Lower Sorbian modifier can visibly carry agreement, so it is tempting to look for the same information on the Kurmanji adjective. In this construction the noun’s ending performs part of the linking work. Do not conclude that the quality has lost its connection to the item merely because the target adjective itself does not reproduce the source ending.
The gender of a target construct head also must not be confused with the sex of an owner named later. A grammatical feminine linking form can belong to the possessed item. It cannot establish that its owner is a woman when the Lower Sorbian reference identifies someone else.
Adding a description can require more than extending the same chain
Thackston distinguishes the primary construct from a secondary construction with a construct extender when ownership and adjective modification interact. A Lower Sorbian phrase describing both whose item it is and what that item is like therefore cannot always be rendered by appending another unmarked adjective to a target owner chain.
Identify whether the added source description concerns the house, the father or another noun. A misplaced modifier can assign a quality to the owner instead of the possession while leaving every dictionary meaning recognizable. For this pair, the useful sequence is to recover the Lower Sorbian dependency chain, place the possessed head appropriately in Kurmanji, and attach each remaining description to the intended level.
Language references