Divehi to Chhattisgarhi: a named person’s group is not a set of identical names
An associative plural includes other people
Gnanadesikan distinguishes Divehi collective plurals from the associative plural used with names, kinship terms and certain pronouns. Her example maumūnu-men̊ denotes Maumoon together with associated people. It does not identify several different people all named Maumoon. That social grouping must be recovered before selecting a Chhattisgarhi plural expression.
Flueckiger’s fieldwork-based linguistic introduction illustrates Chhattisgarhi plural -man through laikaman, referring to boys. A target plural on an ordinary group noun does not independently explain the relationship between a named source individual and that individual’s companions. Simply replacing one source ending with another could leave the wrong group structure.
For a Divehi message about a named person arriving with associates, preserve both the central person and the accompanying group. The sentence differs from a report about several people who happen to share a name, and from a report that the named person arrived alone. The target wording needs to make the intended membership recoverable.
Ownership and plurality can be distributed across different elements
The Divehi grammar places genitive phrases before the noun they modify and identifies -ge as marking a possessor relationship. Chhattisgarhi’s laikaman ke example in Flueckiger expresses a relationship to the boys through plural material and a following postposition. The target arrangement does not reproduce the source suffix on the same kind of element.
If the Divehi source identifies something belonging to the named person and associates, preserve the owners as a group rather than silently reducing them to the named person alone. At the same time, do not make the owned things plural merely because their owners are plural. The count of owners and the count of belongings are different facts.
Flueckiger also records mor and tor for first- and second-person possessive meanings. These forms distinguish the speaker’s ownership from the addressee’s. A Divehi instruction distributing belongings cannot retain only the broad idea of possession while exchanging those personal roles.
A past action need not be corrected toward Hindi
Flueckiger’s account describes the absence of the Hindi-style transitive-past ne pattern in the Chhattisgarhi usage she discusses. Gnanadesikan independently states that Divehi lacks ergative marking across tense and aspect. Translating a past action between these languages therefore does not require importing a Hindi actor marker merely because both belong to the broader Indo-Aryan family.
These observations are scoped descriptions, not an exhaustive contemporary Chhattisgarhi paradigm. They are useful when reviewing a source account of the group collecting its belongings: preserve who performed the completed action, who owns the items and how many people the named group includes. A familiar Hindi-looking correction could obscure the target variety rather than improve that account.
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