Lower Sorbian to Sesotho: a home connection is not simply legal ownership of a house
The source building and the person’s home can require different readings
Stone illustrates Lower Sorbian nanowy dom as father’s house in his account of possessive adjectives. The expression supplies an ownership or association relationship through an adjective derived from father. The surrounding statement still determines whether the speaker means a physical building, a residence or a wider home connection.
The Peace Corps Sesotho manual teaches haeso for my home, haeno for your home and hahabo for his or her home. Its dialogues separately ask about a person’s home and where that person currently stays. Those questions can receive different place names without contradicting each other.
For an original Lower Sorbian account saying that someone lives temporarily elsewhere but has a family home with their father, do not merge the two places. A target answer about the family home should not silently become the temporary address. The source property relationship needs the meaning established by the whole account.
His or her home does not settle the person’s gender
The manual glosses hahabo as referring to either a male or female person’s home. That target expression does not independently identify the person’s gender. A Lower Sorbian sentence can make gender clear elsewhere through a named participant, pronoun or agreement, without requiring the same information in this particular Sesotho form.
An original source comparison between a woman’s family home and a man’s family home must retain which person is associated with each place. Reusing the same target home form can be appropriate, but it can also leave the references unclear if both people appear together. The form itself does not resolve the antecedent.
Nor does our in a longer source family expression necessarily mean that every speaker jointly owns the building. Stone’s nested possessive discussion shows how a modifier can relate to father inside the phrase father’s house. Preserve that family identification without inventing a property arrangement absent from the source.
Where someone comes from can name the immediately previous place
The Sesotho dialogue gives Ke tsoa ofising as coming from the office. It separately discusses a home country, the place where people stay and where they work. The target therefore allows an origin answer about the previous location without treating that location as the person’s family home.
For an original Lower Sorbian exchange asking where a visitor has just come from, an office or shop may be the intended answer. Substituting the visitor’s home connection would change the question. Conversely, a source enquiry about the family home should not become a request to name the last building visited.
The translation needs to separate the father’s associated house, the visitor’s present accommodation and the point of departure. Sesotho home expressions in this lesson identify one relationship; the movement expression identifies another. Maintaining those distinctions is more useful than selecting one broad equivalent of home and applying it to every Lower Sorbian occurrence involving a person and a place.
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