Danish to Somali: deciding whether som introduces a description at all
Som is not always a relative word
The Danish Language Council distinguishes several uses of som. It can introduce a description referring back to a noun, but a phrase such as som barn can instead mean “as a child,” giving a life stage. These meanings must be separated before choosing a Somali construction. A Danish sentence about what someone did as a child does not necessarily identify which child performed an action.
Compare the meanings “As a child, she lived here” and “The child who lived here has moved.” In the first, the childhood phrase situates the woman’s earlier life. In the second, the following description identifies a child. Translating both by mechanically inserting the same target relative connector would change the relation between the childhood expression and the rest of the sentence.
A description can follow a Somali noun without an opening equivalent of som
Morgan Nilsson’s Somali grammar explains that most relative clauses follow their head noun directly, without a relative pronoun corresponding to English who or which. His example Ninkii Xamar ka yimid describes the man who came from Mogadishu. The absence of a separate opening pronoun does not mean the identifying description has disappeared. The connection is made through the Somali noun-plus-clause construction.
This is especially relevant when Danish som refers to a person who also acts in the main clause. A message meaning “The visitor who came yesterday left a parcel” contains one visitor and two events. A Somali rendering should retain the arriving person as the person who left the parcel, even though it need not reproduce the Danish connector. Treating the relative description as a second independent statement can obscure that the writer is identifying a particular visitor.
A relative description is not a full main clause pasted after a noun
Nilsson also explains that Somali relative clauses lack the sentence particles used in main clauses. Thus removing a visible equivalent of som is not the only structural change. A translator cannot reliably build the relative clause by taking a complete standalone Somali statement and attaching it unchanged after the person’s name. The subordinate construction must have the grammatical form appropriate to describing that person.
The grammar distinguishes the usual direct connection from certain relative constructions requiring oo or ee. It also explains combinations such as kaasoo as a demonstrative plus a conjunction, rather than a universal relative pronoun. Consequently, finding a Somali form that sometimes resembles Danish “who” is not enough to justify inserting it wherever som occurs. In “The parcel that the visitor left is upstairs,” the parcel is what was left, not the person who left it. In the earlier life-stage example, there is no parcel-style identifying relative at all. The translation needs to preserve those different relationships, not give the Danish word som one permanent Somali replacement.
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