Lower Sorbian to Norwegian: whose phone stays the same when the sentence changes
The actor and owner can coincide or belong to different people
A Lower Sorbian account of collecting belongings can identify someone taking their own things or taking things belonging to another person. Norwegian Bokmål makes a useful distinction between a subject-related possessive and an ordinary third-person possessive. Establish the owner before selecting the target expression.
NTNU contrasts Peter taking bilen sin, his own car, with Peter taking bilen hans, a car belonging to another man in its example. The action and actor remain the same while the ownership changes. Recognizing the word for car is therefore insufficient to assess the translation.
Stone’s Lower Sorbian account also contrasts subject-related possession with another possessive construction in examples about taking shoes. His discussion cautions that the non-reflexive source alternative can be less decisive about ownership. Where the source leaves a genuine uncertainty, do not invent an outside owner merely to choose a target form confidently.
A possession becoming the subject can require a different pattern
The NTNU lesson states that sin-type possessives cannot be used inside the subject in the construction it teaches. It contrasts a statement that someone’s phone is new with a statement that the person cannot find their own phone. The phone’s sentence role changes even if its owner does not.
This matters when a Lower Sorbian message is rewritten from a person-centred account into an object-centred status update. A writer might first explain who misplaced a phone and then describe the phone itself. The target cannot simply carry the same reflexive expression into every position.
For a lost-property notice, keep three questions separate: whose device it is, who is looking for it and what the next sentence says about the device. An altered possessive pattern may follow the new construction without introducing another owner. Conversely, leaving an inappropriate pattern untouched can obscure the reference.
The lesson concerns Bokmål. Its patterns should not be replaced with a Nynorsk paradigm under a general Norwegian label without checking the intended written variety.
Possessed-noun agreement does not count the owners
NTNU’s table distinguishes sin, si, sitt and sine by the gender and number of the possessed noun. The plural form can therefore accompany several belongings owned by one person. It does not independently establish several owners.
Lower Sorbian can separately identify a pair through its dual personal forms in Stone’s paradigm. Preserve an actual two-person owner group when the source establishes one, rather than trying to recover that headcount from a Norwegian possessive ending controlled by the belongings.
For two visitors collecting several bags, the number of visitors and the number of bags are different facts. A target phrase about their own bags may need a plural possessed-noun form, but that form alone cannot tell the reader whether two or more visitors are involved.
Read the finished exchange by following the same belongings across each sentence. When the actor changes, reconsider whether the owner still coincides with the relevant subject. When the belongings become the subject, reconsider the construction. These checks preserve the Lower Sorbian ownership relationships while allowing Bokmål to change forms for grammatical reasons rather than silently assign the items to another person.
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