Divehi to Marathi: the possessive form can describe the object rather than its owner
One owner can require several target possessive forms
Divehi aharenge can remain the same when the speaker refers to different possessions. Marathi does not always preserve that visible sameness. A change in a Marathi possessive form may reflect the thing possessed rather than a different owner. This is especially useful when translating a short inventory in which one person lists several objects.
Fritz describes standard Divehi personal possessives as genitives and gives aharenge for my. The same account explains that Divehi nouns have lost grammatical gender. Consequently, selecting a new possessed noun does not require the source writer to supply a masculine, feminine, or neuter ownership marker comparable to the target’s agreement distinction.
The Marathi documentation identifies चा, ची, चे, and च्या among the forms of a possessive element. It explicitly associates its gender and number agreement with the possessed entity, independently of the possessor. The same person’s two possessions can therefore produce different Marathi forms without implying that the person changed sex or that a second owner was introduced.
Ownership and grammatical gender answer different questions
Imagine a Divehi message listing the speaker’s bag, letter, and books before a journey. Every occurrence of my still identifies the same traveller. In Marathi, the relevant nouns and their number help determine the possessive construction. Copying one target form across the entire list because the Divehi source repeats aharenge would preserve the owner but disregard the target agreement relationships.
This also works in the other direction during interpretation. If a Marathi result changes the possessive form when the list moves from one object to several, do not immediately read it as a switch from my to our. The number of the possessed objects and the number of their owners are separate dimensions. One person may own many books, while several people may jointly own one object. The Divehi message decides those relationships.
A third-person source such as ēnāge creates another independent issue. In the standard Divehi paradigm, the personal reference does not itself divide into he and she. Target agreement associated with an owned noun must not be used as evidence to invent the owner’s sex. A grammatical feature of the object is not biographical information about the person. This distinction is particularly helpful when a sentence identifies an owner only through a preceding name.
For a returned-property message, keep the ownership chain intact before adjusting its Marathi form. The person whose object is being returned, the person returning it, and the noun naming it can all contribute different information. The possessive agreement belongs to the relationship between the target construction and its head noun; it does not authorize replacing the Divehi owner with whichever participant happens to match the visible ending.
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