Persian to Upper Sorbian: naming an owner without changing the family relationship
Persian ezāfe puts the associated person after the noun
Persian can connect an item with an owner or a person with a relative through ezāfe. The University of Texas course illustrates pedar-e sārā, Sara’s father, alongside ordinary belongings such as a professor’s notebook. The primary noun comes first and the modifying person follows. Upper Sorbian may express the same association through a derived possessive adjective rather than preserving that sequence.
Stone illustrates the Upper Sorbian pattern with nanowy dom, father’s house. His account also allows an adnominal genitive, while describing it as less usual and associated with formality or emphasis. A Persian-to-Upper-Sorbian translation should therefore identify the relationship first, then select an appropriate target noun phrase. The presence of an owner after the Persian noun is not a requirement to leave the owner after the target noun.
A name can become part of a different target structure
Stone’s examples extend the adjectival construction to personal names and institutional naming. A target form connected with a person need not mean that the person legally owns the institution named. This is relevant because Persian ezāfe likewise serves naming as well as possession: the university lesson illustrates places, institutions and titles in addition to belongings.
In a Persian description that names a university after someone, do not silently turn the naming relationship into property ownership. Conversely, an instruction about returning somebody’s notebook does concern the associated item and person. The target may use structurally related material in both descriptions, while the source situation determines which relationship is actually asserted.
Mine is not the same construction as my father
Persian Online separately teaches māl-e man for mine and illustrates a house belonging to the speaker. Its note explicitly excludes family-member descriptions from that particular possession construction. A statement identifying someone’s father should consequently not be interpreted as the same sort of belonging claim as a statement identifying whose house this is.
For Upper Sorbian, distinguish a family association used inside a noun phrase from a complete assertion identifying the owner of an object. Both may answer a broad question about association, but they do different work. A Persian possessive reply about a book does not introduce a family relationship; a Persian family introduction does not treat the relative as an owned object.
The next pronoun must still refer to the intended person
Stone discusses an Upper Sorbian example introducing Jan’s brother and then saying that he gave him a book. In that particular sequence, the following subject pronoun refers to the brother rather than Jan. A possessive adjective can therefore affect the reference problem in a way a Persian reader might overlook by tracking only the most recently visible personal name.
When translating a Persian family account, identify which person performs each subsequent action. If the next clause concerns the brother, retain that reference; if it concerns the named person whose brother was introduced, make the intended relationship clear through the target wording. Do not assume that a name embedded inside a possessive phrase automatically becomes the subject of the next sentence.
This preserves three separate facts: how the people are related, which person or item the noun phrase identifies, and who acts afterwards. Upper Sorbian can change the structure substantially while retaining those facts from the Persian account.
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