Divehi to Serbian Cyrillic: agreement on a participle can require information absent from the source pronoun
The source does not always identify he or she
Divehi ēnā can refer to a man or a woman in the standard-language paradigm described by Fritz. A Serbian sentence in Cyrillic may require gender agreement in a participial construction even when the source reference remains unmarked. The translation should obtain that information from the person already identified, rather than treating the source pronoun as inherently male.
Fritz contrasts the standard absence of grammatical gender in personal pronouns with limited demonstrative traces in Fua Mulaku. Those dialect observations should not be combined into a rule that every Divehi third-person expression identifies sex. In particular, an unqualified standard ēnā should not be assigned an interpretation using a form belonging to a different dialect.
The Serbian documentation distinguishes finite verbs from participles in its account of gender inflection. Participles can carry gender agreement, while finite verbs do not inflect for gender in that account. Thus a source sentence can be adequate for choosing a present finite expression but still leave an additional decision when rendered through a gender-sensitive participial form. The grammatical demand comes from the target construction.
A change of tense must not create a new person
Imagine a Divehi exchange first saying that an identified woman is working and later reporting what she did yesterday. A Serbian translation may show different agreement patterns across those constructions while continuing to refer to the same woman. Choosing a default masculine form for the later sentence would not be justified by the unchanged source pronoun. The earlier identification remains relevant after the time changes.
The reverse situation is also possible: a passage supplies only ēnā and an event, with no name or identifying description. A translation cannot responsibly infer a woman from a nearby feminine object noun or a man from an occupation stereotype. If the target form requires information missing from the passage, the lack belongs to the cross-language mapping, not necessarily to faulty Divehi grammar.
Serbian also has grammatical gender on inanimate nouns. The documentation separates a noun’s lexical gender from agreement features of related words. Consequently, a sentence referring to a person and a building contains different agreement relationships. A form associated with the building cannot establish the person’s sex. This distinction becomes especially important when the Divehi passage uses several short references instead of repeating names.
Consider the intended message that a woman inspected a building and then it was closed. The second reference identifies the building, not the inspector. A target participle connected with that object belongs to the object’s grammatical agreement pattern. Following it as though it described the inspector would change who or what underwent the event. Resolve each reference before interpreting an ending as personal information.
Cyrillic represents the same Serbian grammatical distinctions discussed here; it does not create a separate gender system. For this translation direction, the useful task is to connect each target participle to the correct referent while preserving the source’s established identities. Where the source supplies no personal gender information, a visually familiar target ending should not substitute for evidence.
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