Lower Sorbian to traditional Mongolian: a visible gap need not begin another word
An inflected source form does not predict target spacing
Lower Sorbian can express grammatical relationships through inflected words. Igartua distinguishes grod-owu, genitive dual of castles, from grod-ow, genitive plural. The source form therefore combines a relationship with a count distinction. Both meanings need interpretation before deciding how their Mongolian expression should be written.
Unicode’s traditional Mongolian description explains that certain grammatical suffixes appear separated from their stems by a gap. A visually detached target element can still belong to the same grammatical word. It should not automatically be treated like a separate noun merely because the Lower Sorbian ending was visibly attached.
For an original source caption about the walls of two castles, identify the pair and the ownership relationship independently. Target spacing is an orthographic matter, while retaining exactly two castles is a semantic matter. Joining everything into one unbroken shape cannot compensate for losing the pair in translation.
A gap can also distinguish two lexical stems
The Unicode specification gives two traditional Mongolian spellings transliterated qana: one denotes the outer casing of a vein, while the other, with a separated final vowel, denotes a tent wall. The separated vowel is part of the stem rather than an added suffix. Removing that separation can therefore change the word.
This is especially relevant when a Lower Sorbian phrase supplies an architectural meaning through its nouns and modifiers. A target form that looks broadly similar but has lost a lexical separation might no longer express the intended kind of wall. The familiar source topic cannot repair the altered target spelling.
Do not infer a direct match between every target separation and a Lower Sorbian case boundary. One target gap may involve a grammatical suffix; another may belong inside a lexical stem. The distinction has to be resolved from the Mongolian expression, rather than from how many meaningful pieces can be identified in the source.
Gender terminology describes different systems here
Pankau records colloquial Lower Sorbian article forms ten, ta and to, distinguished by singular grammatical gender. His analysis is specifically scoped to spoken material. That noun-phrase distinction is not the same phenomenon as the masculine and feminine forms discussed in Mongolian script shaping.
The Unicode chapter relates Mongolian gender-form selection to vowel-harmony context and appropriate character shaping. It does not provide a rule that a masculine Lower Sorbian noun requires one Mongolian glyph shape and a feminine noun requires another. Source noun gender and target spelling must be interpreted within their respective systems.
For an original source contrast between a known building and a known room, the Lower Sorbian articles may differ because their nouns belong to different grammatical classes. The translated Mongolian words need their own lexical spellings and suffix forms. Copying the source classification into a visual shaping decision would confuse grammatical reference with how a different writing system encodes its words.
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