Tibetan to Czech: the owner’s identity and the object’s agreement must stay separate
A possessive expression carries two kinds of information
Czech possessive wording can reflect properties of both the owner and the possessed noun. The Czech Universal Dependencies documentation explicitly separates possessor gender and number from the agreement features of the noun being modified. A Tibetan source phrase must therefore be analysed for both sides of the relationship before a Czech form is selected.
The documented můj identifies a first-person possession, while svůj is reflexive possessive material. These categories are not interchangeable labels for a noun that happens to be important to the speaker. Establish whether the possession is anchored to the speaker or linked back reflexively within the target sentence. A Tibetan narrator discussing somebody else’s belongings does not become their owner simply by reporting the event.
The source phrase boundary helps identify the owner
Garrett and Hill’s study of written Tibetan locates case markers at noun-phrase boundaries. This offers a useful starting point when a passage contains an owner, a possessed entity and additional modifiers. A marker after the phrase should not be read as linking only the immediately preceding word to the rest of the sentence.
A Tibetan description of another person’s old possession can contain several meaningful elements before its boundary. In Czech, the target possessive and the adjective must be assigned to the correct noun. Treating the phrase as an unstructured sequence risks making the adjective describe the owner instead of the possession, even if each word has individually been translated correctly.
The noun’s sentence role still controls case
The Czech documentation describes a nominative subject and objects occurring in several different cases, including accusative, dative, genitive and instrumental. An owner–possession relationship inside a noun phrase does not independently determine that phrase’s case in the larger sentence. The same owned item can be an actor in one clause and an affected object in another.
Tibetan case marking should consequently be interpreted for function before Czech inflection is constructed. An expression meaning whose is not a substitute for determining what the phrase does in its clause. The documented Czech čí asks about an owner, while the surrounding construction still establishes the grammatical role of the item whose owner is being asked about.
Lexical compounds require a different kind of interpretation
Garrett and Hill distinguish the Tibetan compound blon-chen, prime minister, from a noun-plus-adjective expression meaning great minister. A Czech translation must preserve that lexical distinction before arranging modifiers or agreement. The shorter source form does not merely omit optional descriptive material.
In a Tibetan account of an official’s possessions, this distinction can interact with ownership. A title identifying the owner should remain a title; an evaluative description of that owner should remain an evaluation. Once that identification is correct, Czech can express the possession and inflect the whole phrase for its actual role. Solving agreement before identifying what the Tibetan phrase means can otherwise produce a polished target sentence about the wrong person or office.
Language references