Lower Sorbian to Setswana: the owner and the owned noun control different pieces
Read both sides of the possessive relationship
Lower Sorbian can express father’s house with a possessive adjective, nanowy dom, or a genitive construction. Stone’s discussion shows why the entire relationship matters: a modified owner requires another arrangement, illustrated by našogo nana dom, our father’s house. Our belongs with father rather than directly identifying the house as jointly owned.
Setswana similarly requires attention to more than one participant in a possessive expression, but distributes the information differently. The Peace Corps grammar explains that a linking form agrees with the owned noun, while the following possessive expression identifies the owner. A single Lower Sorbian adjective therefore cannot be translated by selecting a target owner word and ignoring the noun being possessed.
A changing linker does not mean the owner changed
The grammar gives dikgomo tsa me, my cows. In that expression, tsa agrees with dikgomo, while me refers to the speaker. These pieces do different jobs. A Lower Sorbian reader should not interpret every change in the linking material as evidence that the property now belongs to a different person.
This becomes practical when a message lists several kinds of belongings under the same owner. The target linker follows the class of each owned noun rather than remaining fixed merely because the owner is unchanged. The translation must preserve the repeated ownership relationship while allowing the Setswana constructions to differ according to the actual nouns selected.
A personal name can require additional material
The Peace Corps account also notes ga when a proper name identifies the possessor. Its example of Hilary’s horn includes this marker following the possessive linker. The name is not a substitute for every grammatical component needed to express the relationship. This provides a concrete reason not to translate a Lower Sorbian possessive phrase as two adjacent dictionary nouns.
Stone’s Lower Sorbian contrast between possessive adjective and genitive owner phrase already shows that identifying a person and attaching that identification to another noun are separate tasks. In Setswana, a named owner still requires the appropriate target construction. Preserving the exact name while losing its possessive connection can make the result less informative than the source.
A named group may include companions
The Setswana grammar describes bo- with a proper name as potentially referring to everyone bearing that name or, more commonly in its example, the named person and companions. Stone separately documents Lower Sorbian comitative dual expressions whose total membership can be two or three. Neither pattern should be read through a simple count of visible personal names.
If a Lower Sorbian message connects property with a pair and an accompanying relative, determine whether the relative belongs within the pair or is additional. If the target then refers to a named person’s group, make sure the group intended is the same one. These issues intersect in a possessive phrase: who belongs to the owner group, what noun names the property, and which Setswana linking form that noun requires. Resolving them preserves both ownership and membership instead of producing a phrase that retains the people’s names but changes their relationships.
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