Lower Sorbian to Samoan: own and the kind of possession answer different questions
Keep the owner’s identity separate from the possession type
Lower Sorbian can use a reflexive possessive to identify an owner in relation to the clause. Stone contrasts examples with swoje crjeje, one’s own shoes, and jogo crjeje, his shoes. In the latter example the owner can be the same person or another person. This is a question about reference: whose shoes are being discussed?
Samoan adds a different possessive distinction. Hopperdietzel and Alexiadou describe genitive o and a in constructions traditionally associated with inalienable and alienable relationships. Their choice concerns the relationship between entities, rather than simply selecting between the subject’s own property and somebody else’s. A Lower Sorbian reflexive possessive therefore cannot be translated by treating own as a direct instruction to choose one Samoan marker.
Body relationships do not create an exception-free shortcut
The Samoan study associates o with examples involving body parts, part–whole relationships and characteristic properties. But it explicitly cautions that lexical exceptions occur, including different possessive behavior for beard and another body-part noun. Thus even recognizing a body relationship does not justify replacing the whole construction with an unrestricted rule about permanent possession.
For a Lower Sorbian personal description, first establish whose body part or characteristic is meant. Then choose the Samoan relationship construction appropriate to the noun and intended meaning. These tasks remain separate: identifying the speaker as owner does not settle the genitive category, while choosing a genitive category does not independently identify the correct owner.
Ownership can be broader than legal property
Stone’s Lower Sorbian example with swojim wolojnikom describes writing with one’s own pencil. The possessive identifies the pencil in relation to the writer; it does not supply a complete classification of every possible relationship a target language might distinguish. A shared tool, a borrowed tool and a personally owned tool can require contextual interpretation beyond the source adjective’s agreement.
The Samoan study notes that some nouns allow both possessive categories when the relationship changes. That makes a single fixed dictionary replacement especially risky. If a Lower Sorbian phrase concerns an object temporarily in someone’s use, the translation should preserve that practical relationship instead of silently converting it into a permanent or characteristic association. The target marker must serve the intended reading of the noun phrase.
A possessive-looking phrase can also describe an event
The same study examines Samoan nominalized events, where genitive choices can reflect different participant roles. This differs from treating every phrase translated with of or a possessive as ordinary ownership. A report about a person’s activity may identify who performs it, who undergoes it, or another relation, depending on the actual construction.
Lower Sorbian supplies useful reference clues through its reflexive possessive and other personal forms, but those clues should not replace event analysis. Determine whether the source is identifying an owned thing, a body relationship or a participant in an activity. Then preserve both the person intended and the relationship expressed. In this direction, subject-related ownership and Samoan possessive classification are complementary questions: answering one correctly does not guarantee that the other has been answered at all.
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