Divehi to Korean: a hand phrase may express possession rather than location
Do not put the money into someone’s physical hand
Divehi can describe possession through an existential construction containing atugai, literally in the hand. In Gnanadesikan’s grammar, this wording can express having money without claiming that the money is being held or even carried at that moment. A Korean translation that explicitly locates the money in a hand would add a physical circumstance absent from that reading. The translator has to decide whether the source describes ownership or actual bodily placement before choosing a Korean location phrase.
Korean also uses an existence expression to describe having something, but its noun marking differs. In the teaching example 나는 펜이 있다, the meaning is I have a pen. The pen takes 이, rather than a direct-object marker. This provides a target-side model for understanding possession without a separate lexical verb meaning have. It does not mean that the Divehi hand noun must survive, or that the source possessor’s case ending can simply be copied into Korean.
The same existence word does not make the particles optional
The Korean contrast between 나는 학교가 있다 and 나는 학교에 있다 is particularly revealing: the first says I have a school; the second says I am at school. With the same principal vocabulary, 가 identifies the thing possessed, while 에 identifies the location. A Divehi possessive sentence and a locational sentence should therefore not converge merely because both use existence expressions. An incorrect Korean particle can turn a report about someone’s property into a report about their whereabouts.
Divehi possession itself is not restricted to the hand construction. The grammar distinguishes a genitive-possessor pattern, used for such relationships as family members and immovable possessions, from the hand-locative pattern used for alienable possessions. Korean wording should preserve what relationship is being asserted, rather than imitate this division mechanically. A reference to having relatives is not evidence that the relatives occupy a hand, and an account of available money need not identify a bodily location.
A person can be a spatial landmark without owning the place
Another source of confusion is Divehi’s treatment of human location expressions. Human nouns do not directly take the ordinary locative or ablative/instrumental endings in the described system. Instead, a spatial noun can intervene, with the person marked as genitive. The resulting phrase may look possessive word by word while functioning as a location or source. Its genitive is consequently not enough to establish that the sentence concerns ownership.
Korean likewise permits a landmark followed by a position noun and a location particle: 사람 뒤에 means behind the person. That is a spatial relationship, not a statement about the person’s belongings. When translating a Divehi sentence involving a person and an intervening spatial noun, identify this landmark structure before interpreting its genitive as possession. Conversely, when the Divehi hand expression means have, avoid converting it into a Korean spatial landmark phrase. The distinction is between relationships expressed by the whole construction, not between two dictionary senses of a body-part noun.
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