Catalan to Icelandic: the verb can determine a participant’s case
The same person can appear in different object forms
Catalan can refer to an affected person through a pronoun or a noun phrase without giving every noun the range of case endings found in Icelandic. The target verb can require a specific case, so identifying the right person is only the first part of constructing the target expression.
Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson contrasts Ég hjálpa honum, I help him, with examples in which other verbs take accusative or genitive objects. In the help construction, honum identifies the person receiving assistance. Its case does not independently add a second recipient or turn that person into an owner.
A Catalan source describing assistance should preserve who helps whom while allowing Icelandic to mark the affected participant according to the selected verb. A dictionary match for the main action is insufficient if its object is left in a form required by another predicate.
This also matters for possessives. Catalan possessive gender and number agree with the possessed noun, as the IEC explains. An owner expression inside an Icelandic object phrase must retain ownership while the phrase takes the case appropriate to its role. Source gender agreement cannot independently select that target case.
Near-synonymous target verbs can select different cases
The Icelandic paper illustrates Hann aðstoðaði mig for an assistance event with an accusative object. Its comparison with a help-related dative construction demonstrates that similar event roles need not produce identical morphology across target lexical choices.
When translating a Catalan request for help, changing the Icelandic verb to a near-synonym can therefore require reconsidering the accompanying pronoun. Keeping the previous object form merely because the person remains the same can leave the target inconsistent.
The same issue arises if a source describes somebody missing, expecting or caring for another person. A broad label such as affected person does not predict every Icelandic case. The complete lexical construction determines how the relationship is expressed.
Rögnvaldsson presents his larger theoretical account as preliminary work. The concrete attested contrasts are useful here without turning his proposed generalisations into an exhaustive modern rule for every Icelandic verb or a claim about ongoing language change.
An object in first position need not become the actor
The paper gives Manninn beit hundurinn in a discussion of object topicalisation: the human participant is affected by the dog’s action even though the human noun phrase comes first. The case endings preserve roles that a reader might otherwise guess from order.
A Catalan source can foreground a topic without intending to change who acts. When Icelandic uses a different ordering, follow the marked roles rather than treating the first noun as automatically responsible for the event.
If a source paragraph first names an item and then reports what somebody did to it, the target may organise the information around that item. The resulting prominence does not independently identify the item as subject or actor. For this pair, keep source reference and event roles stable while selecting Icelandic case through the predicate and construction. Correct names and recognisable vocabulary cannot compensate for reversed participants.
Language references