Tibetan to Catalan: plural owners and plural belongings are different
A plural marker does not identify which group owns something
Garrett and Hill’s analysis of written Tibetan distinguishes plural markers from other elements inside the noun phrase. In a Tibetan passage about a group and its belongings, the translator must establish whether plural material belongs to the owners, the possessions or both. Catalan possessive selection depends on preserving those separate relationships.
The Institut d’Estudis Catalans explains that possessives agree in gender and number with the noun they accompany. Thus a plural Catalan possessive is not, by itself, evidence that several people own the item. Translating Tibetan source plurality requires identifying the modified noun rather than transferring a plural impression to whichever target possessive is nearby.
The form llur specifically requires plural owners
The essential Catalan grammar states that llur can replace seu only when the meaning is belonging to them. It cannot replace a third-person singular owner. The documented contrast llur amic and llurs amics keeps the owners plural while distinguishing one friend from several friends.
A Tibetan passage about one person’s friends must therefore not select llurs merely because the friends are plural. Conversely, several people can share a relationship with one friend, for which the singular possessed noun does not make the owners singular. Count the two sides of the relation independently: how many people the ownership or relationship is anchored to, and how many entities are described.
Gender agreement follows the possession
IEC’s teaching explanation gives masculine possessive forms such as seu and seus, alongside the corresponding feminine forms. The agreement follows the accompanied noun. A Tibetan source expression that identifies an owner does not remove the need to determine the Catalan noun’s gender.
The small contrast meu and meva illustrates this target agreement without changing the first-person owner. In translating a Tibetan inventory, switching from one kind of possession to another can change the Catalan possessive form even while the owner stays constant. The translator should not interpret that change as evidence that the source speaker or another participant has changed identity.
Possession can be asserted as well as used to identify a noun
IEC distinguishes a possessive inside a noun phrase from predicative ownership. Its example la taula és seva asserts that the table belongs to the relevant third person. A Tibetan noun phrase identifying somebody’s table and a complete assertion assigning that table to them need to retain their different functions in Catalan.
Garrett and Hill use case markers and clitics to investigate Tibetan phrase boundaries. Those boundaries help the translator avoid treating every nearby reference as one long possessive phrase. In a passage that first identifies an item and then disputes who owns it, the Catalan version must preserve the later assertion as an assertion. Otherwise an actual disagreement about ownership can disappear into a descriptive phrase that assumes the very relation the source was discussing.
Language references