Danish to Tigrinya: choosing a request for the person being addressed
A Danish imperative does not identify its audience
Danish verb guidance lists spis, bo and kys as imperative forms. Those forms identify an action but do not separately display whether the addressee is a man, a woman or several people. A short Danish instruction can therefore leave information unstated that becomes relevant when the request is expressed in Tigrinya.
Mason’s Tigrinya grammar describes contrasting imperative forms according to the gender and number of the addressee, with polite forms resembling plurals in its presentation. Its lesson on requests also distinguishes the suffix for me from suffixes referring to other recipients. The person asked to act and the person benefiting from the action are separate participants.
In a Danish request to show somebody a document, do not select a target addressee form from the identity of the document’s owner. A woman can ask a man to show her another woman’s document. The target must keep the person addressed, the recipient and any possessor apart, even when the Danish wording contains only one explicit personal pronoun.
Formal De does not establish a plural audience
The Danish pronoun system includes formal De alongside ordinary du and plural I. Capitalization distinguishes these address forms from other words in writing. A formal Danish request to one person can thus contain an address form that would be mistaken for a plural reference if its social function were ignored.
The Tigrinya handbook likewise discusses polite and plural forms, but its paradigms are not a license to count recipients from a surface form alone. Translating a Danish formal request requires identifying whether one person or a group is meant before deciding how to express respect within the target construction.
For correspondence, the singular customer behind De remains one customer. If a Danish letter later changes to an instruction for a whole household or team, that is a real change of audience. The Tigrinya wording should follow that change because the participants changed, rather than because Danish courtesy was interpreted as a numerical plural.
A separate object word can become part of the verb
Danish pronoun guidance illustrates object forms such as mig and ham, including after prepositions. In a compact instruction these may stand as separate words. Mason’s request lesson explains that Tigrinya attaches the me element to the verb in the forms it teaches. Counting spaces therefore cannot establish whether the recipient survived the translation.
The handbook also describes independent subject pronouns as potentially emphatic because the verb can already identify its subject. A Tigrinya instruction or statement need not reproduce every separately written Danish pronoun to preserve the same people. Adding an independent pronoun mechanically can introduce emphasis that the source did not intend.
Evaluate who acts on what and for whom, instead of requiring a separate target word for every Danish pronoun. In an ordinary Danish instruction, the main purpose may be transferring or displaying an item, with no contrast between competing recipients. The target should preserve that neutral allocation of roles. If the Danish wording deliberately stresses mig rather than somebody else, however, the contrast is part of the message and deserves an appropriate target expression.
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