Divehi to Maithili: respectful verb forms do not always identify another actor
A causative-looking source form can express respect
Gnanadesikan explains that Divehi honorific verbs are historically built through causative morphology. Her contrast includes guḷanī for joining and guḷuvvanī for joining expressed honorifically. The latter does not necessarily mean that the respected person caused a different person to join. Its social meaning must be distinguished from an ordinary causative event.
For a Maithili translation, identify the actual action and its participants before interpreting the additional source morphology. A Divehi report about a respected person performing an action must not become a report that they ordered someone else to perform it. Respect can change the verb without adding a second actor.
The Divehi account also distinguishes honorific reference to the subject or passive agent from deference toward the listener. In a message about someone else, the person receiving respect through the verb may not be the person reading the message. That distinction is essential when choosing a target expression that can respond to several participants.
The Maithili verb can reflect two existing participants
Yadava, Bond, Nikolaeva and Ritchie describe Maithili double agreement with a primary controller and a secondary controller. Their primary controller is the nominative subject in the constructions analyzed, while another eligible participant can contribute additional person and respect information. Two agreement components do not mean that two people performed the main action.
This creates a different interpretive risk from the Divehi honorific derivation. Extra target morphology may reflect a person already present as another participant, rather than add a newly caused action. Keep the actor separate from the person affected or otherwise referenced by the agreement. The source’s social distinction must be preserved without assuming that the two languages attach it to identical grammatical material.
The study further reports optional secondary agreement in some configurations and obligatory agreement in others. Its analysis is scoped to the variety described; it does not supply one interchangeable suffix for every respectful Divehi sentence. The participants’ roles and their particular person and respect values matter together.
A deferential speaker is not an honorific subject
Fritz’s standard-Divehi description records first-person distinctions tied to the speaker’s relation to the addressee, while noting that the southern varieties do not share that same system. A deferential source first person can therefore carry a social relationship even though the speaker remains the person saying I.
The Maithili study distinguishes əhã as a general polite second-person form from əpne for a higher level in its described system. These are addressee choices. They cannot be selected simply by spotting a respectful-looking Divehi verb whose subject is a different third person.
For a Divehi message in which the writer speaks deferentially to a recipient about a respected relative, keep all three perspectives apart. The writer, recipient and person discussed need not receive the same treatment. A useful Maithili translation preserves those relationships through its own pronouns and agreement rather than converting every source honorific into another actor or a universally elevated addressee.
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