Lower Sorbian to Māori: my house and mine need different grammatical decisions
Possession is not only an owner’s identity
Lower Sorbian can express an owner through a possessive adjective or a genitive phrase. Stone’s nanowy dom, father’s house, illustrates an adjective linking the property to father. Māori possessive forms require another distinction: the relationship between owner and possessed entity. Knowing which person owns something does not by itself determine every possessive form in the translation.
Te Aka describes tōku as referring to one possessed item and associates it with relationships where the possessor lacks control or occupies a subordinate or passive position. Its entry includes He whare tōku, I have a house. Consequently, an ordinary Lower Sorbian statement of having a home should not be translated by treating the Māori possessive category as a measure of legal ownership or personal importance.
One owner is not the same thing as one item
The dictionary’s statement that tōku concerns one item is important when reading a Lower Sorbian source rich in number distinctions. Stone’s pronoun table distinguishes a single speaker, a pair including the speaker, and a larger group. These tell us about people participating or owning. The count of houses, possessions or relatives is a separate question.
A Lower Sorbian dual owner does not mean that two objects are owned. Equally, a singular first-person owner can have several objects. Before choosing a Māori possessive construction, separate the number of owners from the number of things described. This prevents a translator from using an object-count distinction as though it directly represented Lower Sorbian dual membership.
A possessive can sometimes stand without its noun
Te Aka also distinguishes tōku from the unmacronized taku. Both can express my, but taku is a neutral or informal determiner that must accompany a noun; tōku can occur independently. This becomes practical when a Lower Sorbian dialogue names an object once and then contrasts who owns it. A target form suitable before a noun is not automatically suitable for a standalone reply.
An answer equivalent to mine therefore requires attention to the whole Māori construction, rather than deleting the noun from any phrase meaning my object. Conversely, a full noun phrase can permit the neutral form without making an explicit a-category or o-category choice. That option is a grammatical property of the construction, not permission to remove macrons arbitrarily from unrelated words.
Do not transfer adjective expansion mechanically
Stone notes a further Lower Sorbian restriction: its possessive adjective cannot itself take an attributive modifier. His našogo nana dom instead expresses our father’s house through a genitive phrase. The owner’s own modifier belongs with father. Replacing that expression with a target form for our house would collapse two relationships into one and change the family reference.
For this direction, resolve whether the message means a house belonging to the speaker, a house belonging jointly to a group, or a house belonging to a relative identified through that group. Then choose a Māori phrase that retains the intended relationship and works in its sentence position. Lower Sorbian adjective formation, Māori possessive categories and the ability to stand without a following noun answer different questions; none can safely substitute for all the others.
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