Danish to Tamil: the person who feels something and the grammar of needing
An object-form pronoun need not identify an affected object
Danish distinguishes jeg from mig, and han from ham. Its official pronoun guidance uses object forms after prepositions, as in til mig. These forms help show the relationship between people and actions, but their Danish distribution does not provide a ready-made map for Tamil case endings. A Danish subject cannot automatically be assigned the same target case in every construction.
Lehmann’s grammar of Modern Literary Tamil describes certain experience constructions with a dative-marked experiencer. With a restricted set of predicates, a person who understands, likes or experiences pain appears in that case. This is a construction-specific pattern, rather than a claim that Tamil replaces all subjects with indirect objects.
For a Danish account of discomfort, first establish who feels the discomfort and what is being experienced. A Tamil ending associated elsewhere with a recipient does not mean that somebody is giving the feeling to that person. Translating it back mechanically as to him can produce a misleading explanation of a perfectly ordinary target sentence.
Wanting a house is different from giving somebody a house
The grammar illustrates kumaar-ukku oru viitu veent-um with Kumar needing or wanting a house. The person’s dative marking is part of the need construction. The example does not describe a donor transferring a house, and the case ending by itself does not introduce such a donor.
This contrast matters when a Danish request includes a person, a desired item and a practical action. A statement of need does not establish who must provide the item. Conversely, an instruction to give somebody the item should not be reduced to an impersonal statement that the person needs it. Those messages can lead to different responses even when they mention exactly the same people and objects.
Danish possessive min changes to mit or mine with the following noun; the identity of the speaker does not change. In Tamil need expressions, likewise, identifying the person and identifying the desired item are separate tasks. Preserve who needs what before deciding how the target predicate organizes those participants.
A verb ending is not always a description of the experiencer
Lehmann distinguishes experience patterns in which the predicate takes a fixed neuter singular form from patterns where another noun can determine agreement. In the latter group, the dative-marked person need not be the noun reflected in the verb ending. One cannot therefore infer the experiencer’s gender or number simply by inspecting that ending.
For Danish-to-Tamil translation, a neuter-looking ending in a feeling or need construction is not evidence that a human has been classified as an object. Nor should a translator force a masculine or feminine ending solely because Danish han or hun identifies that person. The predicate and construction determine what agreement is available.
The grammar’s scope is Modern Literary Tamil; its detailed paradigms should not be presented as a transcript of every conversational variety. For written messages, distinguish an action performed by a person from a feeling experienced by that person and a requirement concerning an item. That semantic division gives the Tamil construction something accurate to express, while copying Danish pronoun placement alone does not.
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