Divehi to Literary Chinese: preserve who said it and whose words are being repeated
A source quotation ending can become a preceding speech verb
Gnanadesikan describes Divehi quotative particles commonly attached to clause-final verbs, though they can also attach to another quoted element. Eno’s Literary Chinese primer introduces 曰 as a speech verb placed before a direct quotation. The indication that words are quoted can consequently move from the end of source material to a position before the target quotation.
This is a structural difference, not a reason to move the speaker’s identity into the quotation itself. For a Divehi report containing somebody’s promise to come, distinguish the reporting voice from the person making the promise. The target must retain that boundary even though its quotative material does not occupy the same position.
Eno also documents the pattern X 謂 Y 曰 for addressing somebody. Here the reporting structure can identify both speaker and addressee. A Divehi passage that specifies who told whom should not lose the recipient merely because a compact target speech verb makes the line shorter.
Distance from a report is part of its meaning
The Divehi grammar distinguishes -ē from a more distanced -ō. The latter can signal hearsay, but Gnanadesikan also documents its use for another speaker’s contribution or for a quotation inside a quotation. It is therefore too broad to translate every -ō as an admission that the information is untrue.
At the same time, a bare Literary Chinese 曰 establishes speech without automatically reproducing all those Divehi evidential distinctions. If the source marks a report as second-hand, that relationship must remain recoverable in the surrounding target account. Turning it into an unqualified repetition of a directly witnessed statement could strengthen the evidence beyond what the writer supplied.
A quoted conversation can contain several levels: the present narrator, a person recalling a conversation and the speaker inside that remembered conversation. Keep those levels separate before deciding which voice a target first-person expression represents. The source particle’s function depends on that conversational structure, not only its final vowel.
First person belongs to the quoted speaker
The Rebus Classical Chinese course lists 吾 as first-person reference and includes 吾馬病 within a quoted account. The horses belong to the speaker inside that passage, rather than automatically to the narrator who reproduces the passage. The quotation boundary controls whose first-person perspective the reader follows.
This provides a concrete test for a Divehi-to-Literary-Chinese report: identify the person behind a quoted my before judging a target possessive or first-person expression. A passage can preserve the same action while assigning its belongings to the wrong speaker if the reporting levels collapse.
The target’s compactness is useful only when reference remains clear. A report of another person’s words, a nested instruction and the narrator’s own promise may all use short speech constructions, but they do not share one first-person centre. Preserve the speaker, recipient and distance from the report as separate relationships when reorganizing the source quotation.
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