Lower Sorbian to Serbian Latin: distinguish the owner’s features from the owned noun’s ending
A changing target ending need not identify a different owner
The Serbian MULTEXT-East specifications list possessive forms such as njegov, njegova and njegovo under their appropriate grammatical descriptions. The Serbian UD overview explains why two layers are needed: lexical information about a possessor must be kept separate from agreement with the possessed noun.
Stone’s Lower Sorbian grammar describes possessive adjectives derived from nouns, including nanowy dom for father’s house. That source adjective identifies a father as owner while participating in a noun phrase. Its form should not be read as if every ending supplied a separate fact about the father.
For an original source account of a man’s house and his belongings, Serbian possessive agreement can change with the target heads while the owner remains the same man. The changed ending does not establish a new woman owner or another group of owners. Determine the target head before interpreting the inflection.
Count the owners separately from the property
Lower Sorbian retains active dual number, and Igartua illustrates a genitive distinction between a pair of castles and a plural group. This demonstrates that a source case-number form can identify a relationship and an exact pair together. The target must preserve both where the source makes them relevant.
A Serbian possessive expression likewise has to distinguish a plural owned noun from multiple owners. An original Lower Sorbian reference to two brothers’ shared house contains two owners and one house. A reference to one brother’s two houses reverses those quantities. The shared ownership vocabulary does not make the situations equivalent.
The target’s agreement with house or houses cannot independently recover how many brothers own the property. Retain the source owner phrase clearly enough that two stays associated with the brothers in the first case. Do not infer the possessor’s number from an ending selected for the owned head.
An owner expression can itself contain a family relationship
Stone also discusses a source phrase meaning our father’s house, where a modifier relates to the father underlying the possessive adjective. The expression contains a family connection inside the property connection. Translating it as merely our house could lose which father the source has identified.
For an original message contrasting our father’s house with another relative’s house, keep the two owner expressions distinct. Serbian has its own possessive adjectives and genitive constructions; a suitable target form must express the intended owner rather than imitate every source derivational ending. A familiar cognate is not enough if its dependency has changed.
This Latin-script direction concerns Serbian grammar written with its Latin alphabet. It is not a separate language system in which ownership or agreement means something different from Cyrillic Serbian. The particular task here is reading two layers of possessive information and any nested owner phrase correctly, then expressing them in Serbian forms whose endings belong to their target heads.
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