Lower Sorbian to Urdu: an owner ending can resemble a plural without counting several owners
Read the source count before interpreting an Urdu oblique form
Igartua’s Lower Sorbian study distinguishes grod-owu, genitive dual of castles, from grod-ow, genitive plural. The source ending identifies an exact pair rather than just a relationship of belonging. Losing that number distinction can change which places or people the account concerns.
Ranjan’s Urdu textbook explains that a noun before the possessive postposition takes an oblique form. It specifically warns that forms such as کمرے and لڑکے can resemble plurals while functioning as singular obliques. A visible ending alone therefore does not establish that there are several rooms or boys.
The textbook gives کمرے کا دروازہ, the room’s door, and کمرے کے پردے, the room’s curtains. The owner can remain one room while the owned items differ. Reading the room form as necessarily plural would add owners that the expression does not itself establish.
For an original Lower Sorbian description of two rooms’ windows, retain the exact pair in the Urdu owner phrase. A target oblique form that also occurs with one room does not independently preserve the source dual. The quantity must remain recoverable through the actual target counting expression or established reference.
Conversely, a singular source owner must not become a pair simply because the Urdu form looks plural to someone reading it through Lower Sorbian expectations. Interpret the target case environment before drawing a numerical conclusion. Oblique marking and plural number are different explanations for a word’s visible shape.
The owned noun selects a separate agreement choice
Ranjan describes کا, کی and کے as forms that agree with the following owned noun in the relevant grammatical features. The owner’s natural gender does not choose the marker. A male owner can therefore occur with different forms when the objects he owns differ.
Stone describes Lower Sorbian possessive adjectives, illustrating nanowy dom for father’s house. Such a compact source expression can encode an ownership relationship differently from Urdu’s owner-plus-postposition construction. It should not be translated merely by treating the source adjective as a descriptive quality of the building.
For an original source reference to one father’s room and his books, preserve the same father while selecting the Urdu marker for each owned head. A changed target possessive form need not introduce a different owner. The translation’s agreement should follow the room or books, rather than inventing a change of family relationship.
A longer source expression can also contain two counts: two owners and several possessions, or one owner and two possessions. The Urdu owner’s oblique form and the possessive marker have distinct jobs. Neither alone supplies every numerical distinction that a Lower Sorbian case-number phrase can express.
The useful reading sequence is therefore semantic rather than visual: establish who owns what and how many owners the source identifies, then form the Urdu owner phrase and its head agreement. This preserves the Lower Sorbian pair where it matters without mistaking an ordinary singular oblique for a new plural group.
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