Divehi to Persian: the ownership link changes sides
The source genitive and the target connector occupy different places
Fritz describes Divehi possession through genitives of personal pronouns, with aharenge as a standard first-person possessive. Her house example places the ownership expression with the house in a source construction whose morphology identifies the speaker as owner. The source ending belongs to the owner expression.
The University of Texas Persian lesson gives ketāb-e man, my book, and qalam-e to, your pen. The head noun comes first, followed by an ezāfe connection and the owner. The short linking sound belongs after the head; it is not a suffix placed on the Persian pronoun simply to imitate the Divehi genitive.
For an original Divehi reference to the speaker’s book, retain the first-person owner while constructing the Persian noun phrase. Keeping the source sequence and adding an ending to the pronoun would not reproduce the target lesson’s pattern. Ownership survives through the target relationship, not through copying the source marker’s position.
The Persian lesson also shows ownership by a named person or a role noun. A Divehi owner expressed through a name and one expressed through a personal pronoun need not be assigned unrelated target constructions merely because their source forms look different. What matters is which expression identifies the owner.
Conversely, a short connector after a Persian noun does not mean that the following expression is always its owner. The same linking construction also introduces adjectives and other kinds of modifiers. The source meaning must determine what relationship that target link conveys.
A visible or invisible connector does not make every relation possessive
The Persian lesson explains that ezāfe after a consonant is pronounced but commonly omitted in ordinary spelling. A target phrase can therefore contain the appropriate connection without displaying a separate written letter for it. Counting visible counterparts of the Divehi genitive would miss that feature.
For an original source contrast between a teacher’s book and a good book, the target can use ezāfe in both noun phrases while expressing different relations. The first identifies an owner; the second supplies a quality. The shared connector does not turn good into the name of a possessor.
Fritz also documents southern Divehi source-of-person expressions built with a genitive and a following element meaning from the side of. Such a genitive inside a larger construction is not automatically ordinary property ownership. The complete source phrase must be interpreted before choosing the Persian relation.
An original account of obtaining a book from a teacher differs from identifying the teacher’s book. The teacher can be the source without being the owner, or the owner without personally providing it. Translating both through a bare ownership phrase would remove that distinction.
The exact-direction task is thus to recover the Divehi relationship first and then build the appropriate Persian phrase. A source genitive can contribute to possession or a larger source construction, while Persian ezāfe can link an owner or another modifier. Similar grammatical labels and missing written vowels must not override what the source actually says about the book and the person.
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