Amharic to Latvian: keep gender, obligation, and case in their own places
A listener gender is not an adjective agreement rule
Amharic singular address distinguishes male and female listeners. Latvian tu is singular you without that same division, while viņš and viņa distinguish he and she in third-person reference. Preserving the source listener does not mean replacing a second-person reference with a gendered third-person one.
Latvian also requires grammatical gender agreement in noun phrases. An Amharic note describing an item should include the item noun rather than only a detached quality. The agreement needed for a Latvian object description follows that noun, not automatically the gender of the speaker, buyer, or person being addressed.
An obligation can put the person in a different case
Latvian obligation constructions can place the relevant person in the dative. The documented man jāskatās spēle means I have to watch the game. An Amharic reader should therefore avoid treating a non-nominative first-person form as proof that the translator has made somebody else the subject of the obligation.
Contrast the Amharic ነገረኝ, he told me: here the attached first-person form identifies a recipient, not the person doing the telling. Latvian man in the obligation example identifies the person who must act. Mapping every Amharic object reference onto a Latvian dative without examining the predicate could turn the recipient of an instruction into its responsible actor, or remove the obligation from the actor altogether.
Noun endings identify relationships throughout the phrase
Latvian has case distinctions covering nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, and vocative. Adjectives and determiners can agree with nouns in case as well as gender and number. An Amharic name followed by a description may therefore become several coordinated inflected forms in the target.
Keep a customer's name and the description identifying them together during checking. The extra endings are not evidence of several customers or of repeated information. For an address instruction, inspect the destination expression as a phrase, because recognizing the place-name stem alone will not establish whether the right location relationship has survived.
Gender can disappear from the finite verb without changing the listener
Latvian finite verbs do not inflect for gender, although participles can. The source Amharic nonpast forms ትነግር and ትነግሪ distinguish masculine and feminine singular you tell. A corresponding Latvian finite form need not reproduce that contrast. Its absence is not evidence that the woman addressed in the Amharic message has become a man.
An exchange can therefore preserve the same female addressee while using gender-neutral tu and a finite verb, then show feminine agreement elsewhere when the construction requires it. Conversely, adding viņa simply to make gender visible would introduce she and change the conversational perspective. When an Amharic sender quotes another woman speaking directly to the recipient, distinguish the quoted you from an outside narrator’s she before evaluating Latvian agreement. The source gender cue identifies a participant; it does not require one fixed target ending everywhere.
Language references