Divehi to Punjabi: self-reference and ownership need different treatment
A repeated person can still be the same person
Divehi does not require a special unemphatic reflexive pronoun in every sentence where someone acts on themselves. Gnanadesikan records a mirror example in which Aisha is named twice: the experiencer and the person seen are the same individual. A Punjabi translation should recognize that relationship before replacing the second name with an ordinary third-person expression, which could suggest a different person. The repetition is grammatical evidence about reference, not necessarily an introduction of a second Aisha.
Punjabi University identifies ਆਪ and ਆਪਣੇ ਆਪ as reflexive expressions. Those forms provide resources for making self-reference explicit, but they should not be inserted automatically into every Divehi sentence with a repeated name. The source relationship matters: seeing oneself, personally doing a task, and acting without assistance are different claims. A target sentence emphasizing personal involvement can fail to express that the actor is also the person affected.
One’s own is not a universal dictionary substitution
The Divehi genitive timāge belongs to a generic expression of one’s own. The grammar expressly cautions against equating it with the broadly anaphoric Hindi possessive apnaa. That warning is relevant when approaching Punjabi’s related-looking reflexive possessive system: a familiar South Asian word does not prove that the source uses the same grammatical rule. A specific person’s property may be described through another Divehi expression, while timāge may refer generically to an unspecified individual.
Punjabi possessive forms also change shape. The university’s paradigm gives ਆਪਣਾ and ਆਪਣੀ, with further number and case forms. A translator cannot choose between them solely from the sex of the Divehi owner. The Punjabi noun phrase supplies grammatical requirements absent from the surface shape of the Divehi generic possessive. Keeping the ownership relationship intact therefore involves both resolving the owner and building a correctly inflected target phrase.
Gender-neutral reference can meet gender-marked predicates
The Punjabi pronoun lesson describes ordinary personal pronouns as available for either gender, apart from the additional inflection of genitive forms. Thus a gender-neutral Divehi third-person reference need not force an immediate choice between two gender-specific Punjabi personal pronouns. That apparent similarity should not be extended to the rest of the sentence. Punjabi agreement can make distinctions that the source pronoun itself does not reveal.
In the university’s present-tense lesson, masculine and feminine patterns differ in the participial part of the predicate, and the auxiliary also contributes agreement information. Divehi permits arguments to remain unexpressed when understood or left vague, with limited person marking and no colloquial number marking on the verb. A missing source subject consequently cannot always supply the Punjabi agreement features by inspection. In a self-directed action, first establish whether the missing actor and affected person coincide; then identify what the actual Punjabi predicate requires. Guessing gender from a name would resolve neither problem reliably.
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