Danish to Setswana: sig can become part of the verb rather than a separate pronoun
The Danish reflexive identifies a repeated participant
The Danish Language Council explains that sig refers back to the sentence’s subject. In a Danish statement about a person hurting themselves, the actor and the affected person are the same individual. This differs from a statement about that person hurting somebody else, even though both events involve an actor and an affected participant. A Setswana translation must preserve that identity rather than merely repeat two independent personal words.
The Peace Corps Setswana grammar describes a reflexive prefix i- that expresses an action directed back at the subject. The reflexive information can therefore appear inside the target verb. A translation without a separately written counterpart of sig is not necessarily missing the second role. The verb may already express that the subject is also the person affected.
The verb’s beginning may change as well as grow longer
The manual illustrates the reflexive with ruta, teach, and ithuta, learn or teach oneself. Its description includes sound changes triggered by the prefix: the r of the teaching stem does not simply remain after an added vowel. For a Danish reader looking for a familiar target dictionary form, this is a reason to consider the whole derived verb rather than insist that its first consonant remain unchanged.
A Danish instruction meaning “Teach yourself the pattern” explicitly presents learning as an action directed toward oneself. A Danish instruction meaning “Teach the child the pattern” identifies another learner. They should not collapse into the same reflexive target form merely because both concern instruction. Conversely, using a non-reflexive target verb with a vaguely similar meaning can obscure whether the person is meant to act independently or instruct someone else.
One group acting on itself is not always mutual action
The Setswana grammar separately describes reciprocal -ana as an extension for acting on one another. Its position and function differ from the reflexive prefix. Thus a Danish source meaning “They helped themselves” and one meaning “They helped each other” can require different target analyses. The first directs the action back toward the acting participants; the second highlights reciprocal relations among them. A plural subject alone does not settle which was meant.
Danish also has subject-referring possessives sin, sit, and sine. These establish ownership, not an automatic instruction to make the target action reflexive. In a message meaning “She teaches her own child,” the child remains another participant even though the source possessive points to the subject as parent. Applying a reflexive prefix merely because sin appears would therefore change who receives the teaching. Distinguish self-directed action, mutual action, and ownership within an object phrase. Setswana expresses these relationships through constructions whose meaningful pieces need not occupy the same separate word positions as Danish sig or its possessive relatives.
Language references