Lower Sorbian to Turkmen: visiting a person and describing the route there
Coming to somebody can say more than visiting
David Gray’s Turkmen grammar specifically warns against substituting a person in the dative into a visit expression without considering the result. Its contrast includes meniň ýanyma for coming to see the speaker, alongside a different coming-to-me construction interpreted as a marriage proposal. The grammatical destination is therefore not the only information conveyed by the complete expression.
Lower Sorbian has a dedicated supine used especially after motion verbs, as the Sorbian Institute explains. A source sentence describing movement to perform another action must preserve that purpose, rather than simply attach the intended visitor to a target destination ending. Going to find someone, going to their place and proposing marriage are not interchangeable ways to describe movement toward a person.
For a Lower Sorbian invitation to visit, identify the social action before judging the Turkmen wording. Gray’s warning is about the cited constructions, not a claim that the dative is forbidden with every person. The destination and the intended encounter must both survive translation. A mechanically plausible case substitution can otherwise produce a much stronger personal proposal than the writer intended.
A source word before the noun may move after its target equivalent
The comparative Lower Sorbian word-order study illustrates na domje, a location on a house, and rejects reversing those two elements in that example. It describes Lower Sorbian as predominantly prepositional while recognizing a few exceptions. Thus even a language with substantial sentence-order flexibility does not allow every short phrase to be reversed freely.
Gray lists Turkmen postpositions with the cases they usually require on preceding nouns. A source location phrase may consequently change both order and case when its relation is expressed through a target postposition. Moving the relational word is not itself evidence of an error. The question is whether the Turkmen phrase still places the person or object at the intended location, rather than expressing a destination or a starting point.
A possessive-looking route expression need not introduce an owner
The Peace Corps Turkmen manual explains the noun relationship inside its bus-stop expression through a suffix on the second noun. Its adjoining street-direction example combines a street reference, a side expression and location marking. The manual’s grammatical use of possession here describes how nouns are linked; it does not require an actual person who owns the stop or the street.
This matters for Lower Sorbian directions that mention a stop on the other side of a street. The target may contain morphology associated with possessive constructions even when the source gives only spatial information. Adding an owner to explain that morphology would alter the route. Read the linked nouns and the location marking together: which stop is meant, what street supplies the reference, and which side contains the destination are separate pieces of the original instruction.
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