Lower Sorbian to Serbian Cyrillic: who acted and whose object are different agreement questions
The actor’s gender does not come from the owned object
Stone’s Lower Sorbian discussion contrasts reflexive ownership of shoes with a non-reflexive third-person possessive that can leave the owner ambiguous. The actor taking something and the person owning it must therefore be identified separately. The object noun’s grammatical properties do not identify either person by themselves.
The Serbian Universal Dependencies overview distinguishes gender-bearing participial forms from finite verb forms that do not inflect for gender. Original simple examples Он је писао and Она је писала mean that he wrote and she wrote. The participle’s form reflects the writer, not the grammatical gender of whatever was written.
For an original Lower Sorbian report about a woman writing with another person’s pencil, Serbian needs to preserve the female writer and the separate owner. Selecting a masculine participle because the pencil belongs to a man would transfer ownership information into the wrong grammatical relationship.
A possessive ending can describe the thing rather than the owner
The Serbian overview explicitly separates lexical gender and number of the possessor from inflectional agreement with the possessed noun. This distinction is useful for Lower Sorbian source phrases where a familiar possessive form can tempt the reader to infer the owner from the ending alone.
Compare original source accounts of a man taking his own shoes and taking another man’s shoes. The shoes can have the same number in both accounts, and the taker can have the same gender. The ownership relation nevertheless changes. Target participial agreement cannot independently communicate that contrast.
The Cyrillic output should thus be read through two dependencies: the participial construction identifies the actor’s relevant agreement features, while the possessive expression identifies the owner and agrees as the target requires. A fluent-looking sentence can still report the wrong possession if those dependencies have been merged.
A planned event is not a past participle with a similar-looking ending
The Serbian overview also notes that the future auxiliary can be attached to a verb in Serbian, giving a form corresponding to will provide. Such spelling does not make the whole form a past participle. Recognizing the target tense construction is separate from noticing a familiar Slavic word shape.
Lower Sorbian retains a special supine after motion verbs, according to DOBES. For an original source plan to go somewhere to write, retain the intended activity rather than turning the plan into an assertion that someone already wrote. Choosing a correctly gendered Serbian past form would not repair the incorrect event time.
These decisions work together in a source message about a woman going to write with her own materials. Preserve the future journey or purpose, identify the woman as the actor, and keep the ownership attached to her rather than another mentioned person. Cyrillic is the requested Serbian writing system; the grammatical relationships still need full translation rather than letter substitution between related Slavic words.
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