Divehi to Latvian: responsibility can take a different subject construction
The person obliged to act can change case
Gnanadesikan describes Divehi jehenī as an obligation expression with a direct-case subject and an infinitive. Her example concerning parties bearing responsibility shows why a source obligation does not have to place its responsible participant in dative. The grammatical form of that participant belongs to the selected Divehi construction.
Latvian documentation gives a different pattern. The Universal Dependencies description identifies dative subjects with necessitative predicates and illustrates man jāskatās spēle for an obligation to watch a game. The person expressed by man remains the person obliged to watch, not a new recipient to whom someone transfers the game.
A Divehi instruction assigning a task to a particular person must preserve that assignment through the change in case. A target dative can be appropriate even when the source responsible person was unmarked. Conversely, keeping a nominative-looking target pronoun merely to mirror Divehi could disrupt the Latvian obligation construction.
Necessity is not automatically a passive event
Kalnača and Lokmane’s Latvian grammar discusses Man ir jālasa grāmata as an active action performed by a noncanonical subject. It explicitly rejects treating all debitive forms as simply a subtype of passive voice, while also documenting genuine passive debitive forms. The case pattern alone does not mean the responsible person has stopped being the actor.
This helps distinguish a Divehi requirement that somebody read a book from a statement that a book was read by an unidentified person. Both mention a book, but they allocate action and necessity differently. The Latvian result must retain the obligation if that is what the source asserts, rather than reduce it to an ordinary completed passive.
The Latvian grammar also documents auxiliaries distinguishing tense and perfect forms of the debitive. Thus an account of an earlier obligation and a new instruction need not have identical target wording. Preserve when the requirement applies, not merely the identity of the person assigned to it.
A reported requirement is different from the writer’s own instruction
Lokmane and Kalnača’s separate study of debitive semantics describes an oblique debitive subtype used to relay someone else’s necessity. Its short esot jādara combines reported information with an obligation. The expression carries a source-of-information distinction in addition to the requirement itself.
For Divehi correspondence, establish whether the writer directly assigns responsibility or reports what another person says is required. Those messages can have identical participants and actions while differing in who supplies the requirement. Selecting a reported Latvian construction without that source meaning could distance the writer from a direct instruction; omitting it could present somebody else’s requirement as the writer’s own assertion.
Latvian’s grammatical overview separately recognizes a modal-plus-infinitive construction with a dative subject. A single source obligation word therefore does not choose one target shape independently of its context. Follow the intended responsibility, time reference and reporting relationship together. Each can require grammatical material that is arranged differently from Divehi’s direct-subject obligation expression.
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