Divehi to Filipino: referring to a person does not automatically select si
A source person class and a target personal-name marker are different
Fritz distinguishes Divehi case formations involving persons from those involving non-persons. In her description, synthetic ablative/instrumental formations are restricted to the latter, while reference to people uses other constructions. This source classification concerns the grammatical treatment of a referent as a person.
The MIT Tagalog fieldwork notes distinguish ordinary noun markers ang, ng and sa from si, ni and kay with personal names. Their examples contrast an ordinary teacher expression with a named recipient. A target personal-name marker cannot be selected merely because the Divehi referent is human.
For an original Divehi message referring to a teacher by role, the ordinary Filipino noun phrase ang guro can identify a person. A source message naming Ana can instead involve si Ana in the appropriate construction. Both referents are people, but the target expressions belong to different noun-phrase patterns.
Changing the source role noun to a personal name would add information. Treating every human role expression as a name because it belonged to the Divehi person class would also misread the target grammar. Identify how the actual source refers to the person before choosing the Filipino marker series.
The same distinction applies beyond the ang/si pair. A recipient identified through a name and one identified through an ordinary role noun need the target construction appropriate to that expression. The Divehi semantic class is useful evidence about reference, but it is not a complete Filipino marker-selection rule.
The verb determines which participant receives the relevant marker
The MIT notes also show that a Filipino verb construction affects which noun phrase is marked with ang. A human actor is not universally the ang phrase, and a book is not universally an ng phrase. The target markers have to be read together with the verb and the event roles.
For an original Divehi account of a teacher giving a book to a student, retain teacher as giver, book as transferred item and student as recipient. A target clause that places one participant in the prominent grammatical relation still needs the appropriate roles for the others. Marker changes should not reverse the transfer.
Fritz separately documents a standard Divehi person-source expression using kuren with a meaning corresponding to from the side of. That relationship must not be collapsed into to a person simply because a target name can appear with kay in some other construction. The event determines whether a person is source, recipient or another participant.
Compare an original source request to obtain a book from Ana with one to give a book to Ana. The same name occurs, but the transfer direction differs. Selecting a marker from a short people-versus-things list cannot preserve the direction without the corresponding target construction.
The exact-direction work is therefore twofold: distinguish personal names from ordinary role nouns in Filipino, and preserve the Divehi participant relationships through the selected verb pattern. Source person-class morphology, target name markers and target grammatical prominence each organize different information. None should be substituted automatically for the others.
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