Amharic to Welsh: a changed first letter can preserve a relationship
Do not look only at the end of a word
Amharic packs participant information into verbal prefixes and suffixes. Welsh also changes words grammatically, but a particularly visible feature is mutation at the beginning of a word. A Welsh noun can therefore look different from its dictionary entry without having been replaced by another noun.
The Academy dictionary illustrates cath and y gath, cat and the cat. This is not a plural distinction. In that construction the feminine singular noun undergoes a change after the article. When comparing a translated Amharic description with a vocabulary list, inspect the initial consonant in context before deciding that the translator selected the wrong object.
Ownership can change the following word
Welsh ei can express his or her, with different mutation patterns helping distinguish the construction. The dictionary documents ei fab ef, his son. Amharic also expresses gender distinctions, but the clue may occur in a different place; translating accurately means preserving the relationship rather than copying the location of its marker.
For an Amharic message about two relatives' belongings, identify the owner explicitly before the item. Do not evaluate Welsh ei alone as though its spelling settled the owner's identity. The following word and any reinforcing pronoun form part of the expression. A change to that word's first consonant can be grammatical information rather than a spelling inconsistency.
A source addressee is not automatically a Welsh address style
Amharic distinguishes አንተ and አንቺ for masculine and feminine singular you. The source distinction tells you about the listener, but it does not by itself choose the most appropriate Welsh register. A private family message and a public instruction require different editorial decisions even when both address a single person.
Keep the grammatical person stable through the translation. If the Amharic original switches from telling one person what to do to describing what another person did, name that transition clearly. Welsh mutation should be checked against the actual construction; it should not be repaired by guessing from the gender of the person mentioned earlier.
Reading a short instruction as a complete expression
Welsh prepositions can also trigger mutation, and Welsh has inflected prepositional forms. An Amharic relational expression may therefore become a target phrase whose grammar is spread across both the relationship word and the next word. A dictionary lookup of each unmodified noun will not reconstruct all of it.
For a useful final pass, group a Welsh instruction into actions, participants, and relationship phrases before comparing it with Amharic. Preserve the source's recipient and owner, then check the target's mutation in those groups. This approach is particularly helpful for a small sign or message, where a single changed consonant is conspicuous and there may be little surrounding text to explain why it is correct.
Language references