Lower Sorbian to Pashto: the pencil’s owner and the person receiving it need separate readings
A source possessive establishes an ownership relationship
Stone’s Lower Sorbian example won piso ze swojim wolojnikom identifies a man writing with his own pencil. The reflexive possessive links ownership to the subject. A translation that preserves writing and pencil but assigns the pencil to another person has altered the event’s participants.
Tegey and Robson’s Pashto course describes weak pronouns that can express possession and direct objects. These forms can appear away from the noun or verb whose relationship they express, in a position after the first stressed element. Their written proximity is therefore not a reliable guide to which word they modify.
For an original Lower Sorbian account in which a man hands his own pencil to another person, distinguish the owner, giver and recipient. The source reflexive settles one connection. The Pashto translation must retain that connection while expressing the other participant through the target construction, rather than reading every short pronoun as an owner.
Target pronoun order does not simply mirror source participant order
The Pashto course discusses a fixed ordering of multiple floating particles and weak pronouns. Its explanation includes ambiguity between a weak possessive associated with the subject and a weak object pronoun. Changing their sequence freely is not a general solution, because their order follows the target’s grammatical pattern.
Stone also notes potential ambiguity in Lower Sorbian non-reflexive third-person possession. The target can therefore inherit an unresolved ownership question and add its own structural ambiguity if the participants are encoded carelessly. A short translation is not necessarily a clearer one merely because it contains fewer explicit nouns.
Imagine an original source statement contrasting your brother sending him with his brother sending you. The persons are the same set, but the ownership and object relationships differ. The Pashto course discusses precisely this kind of competing interpretation and the use of strong pronouns for clarity. The Lower Sorbian source must determine which interpretation is intended.
Past actions change what an omitted target pronoun can represent
Tegey and Robson explain that, in their past transitive pattern, the verb agrees with the object and the actor is oblique. A weak object can be omitted where the ending supplies the information. This differs from assuming that an absent pronoun always represents the actor of the event.
For an original source report that someone took the writer’s pencil, do not infer the taker solely from a Pashto ending identifying the object. Ownership, acting and being acted upon remain different roles. The source pencil owner does not automatically become the person who took it.
This makes Lower Sorbian reflexive ownership useful evidence rather than a form to copy blindly. Preserve whether the actor owns the item, resolve any other owner from the narrative, and select target pronouns according to the actual tense and participant roles. Pashto can express those relationships compactly, but its compactness depends on a grammar different from the source’s possessive expression.
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