Danish to Amharic: separating the speaker, the listener and gendered verb forms
Danish du can leave an Amharic distinction unresolved
The Danish language guidance lists du as a second-person singular subject form and dig as its object form. Neither spelling selects the addressee’s gender. In the Amharic conjugation documented by Universal Dependencies, masculine and feminine singular second-person forms are distinguished.
The Amharic past examples ነገርክ and ነገርሽ both correspond to you told, but address a masculine and feminine singular participant respectively. A Danish report about what you said can therefore require a target choice that the source pronoun does not settle.
Identify the person being addressed from the actual exchange before making that choice. A Danish sender may write to a named colleague, to a visitor or to an unspecified future reader. Those situations provide different amounts of information. An arbitrary gendered Amharic ending would add a claim about the addressee rather than merely express the Danish sentence.
The speaker’s gender is not the listener’s gender
The Amharic documentation also distinguishes object clitics, illustrating ነገርኩህ and ነገርኩሽ for I told you with different singular listeners. Here the relevant contrast concerns the recipient of the telling, not whether the person saying I is male or female.
This is a useful distinction when translating Danish first-person messages. In a clause with jeg as the speaker and dig as the listener, the two personal references have different roles. Choosing a target object form from the writer’s identity would attach the gender distinction to the wrong participant.
The Danish source can make the direction of communication clear without encoding that extra distinction. Preserve its clear information first: who told something, and who was told. Then resolve the additional Amharic choice from the listener’s identity, if available. The fact that the target combines information into one written verb does not make the sender and recipient the same person.
A Danish preposition and an Amharic clitic need not remain separate words
The Danish guide illustrates personal pronouns after prepositions, including til mig in a sending example. Its object form differs from subject jeg. That form identifies a participant inside a relationship; it does not mean that every target translation must retain an independent word in the same position.
The Amharic documentation distinguishes verbal subject agreement from object-pronoun clitics. It notes that subject agreement remains even with an explicit noun subject. Consequently, a name in the target sentence does not make its verbal agreement redundant, and an object attached to the verb need not be expanded merely to match Danish spacing.
In a Danish account mentioning a sender by name and a recipient by pronoun, check both layers separately. The verb’s subject marking must fit the sender; the object reference must fit the recipient. Correctly identifying one does not establish the other.
The practical comparison is about participant roles, not matching word counts. A Danish phrase with a preposition and pronoun can correspond to a different Amharic construction, while a compact target verb can encode more than one person. Preserve who communicates with whom before assessing how many visible words the translation contains.
Language references