Divehi to Setswana: travelling with someone is not the same as joining two statements
A companion belongs inside the travel event
Divehi ekugā can express being together with someone in the standard-language material described by Fritz. A Setswana translation can use le for accompaniment, but the same target word also joins nouns. The translator needs to preserve whether the source names a travelling companion or simply lists two participants or things.
Fritz relates standard ekugā to southern ekī and explains their together-with meaning. These are not interchangeable spellings from one uniform dialect: the source form helps identify which variety is being described. In an ordinary travel message, the important relationship is participation in the same journey, rather than ownership or an instrument used for travelling.
The Setswana handbook gives Ke ile le Naledi kwa London for going with Naledi to London. It also uses le to connect chicken and beef in a food preference. These two functions can be useful equivalents in different source constructions, but neither implies that le can join any two complete sentences as an all-purpose translation of and.
Two clauses can describe different events
The handbook explicitly distinguishes le from conjunctions used to combine sentences. This matters when a Divehi message says that one person travelled and another person stayed home. Those are two claims about different events. Connecting only the two people as if they were companions would misrepresent the second person’s location and participation.
Compare the original intentions I went with my sister and I went, and my sister called. The first gives a companion in one journey. The second gives two events and does not establish that the sister travelled. A target translation must not choose the same structure solely because an English explanation of both messages contains and or with somewhere in its wording.
Ownership is another separate relationship. The handbook’s dikgomo tsa me identifies my cows through a possessive construction, with tsa agreeing with the cows and me identifying the speaker. A Divehi message about travelling with a friend’s cattle can therefore contain both accompaniment and possession. Turning the owner into a travelling companion would claim that the friend went too, which the ownership phrase does not establish.
The source’s personal genitives, such as aharenge, and its together-with expression contribute different information. A note can identify an object as mine without saying that I accompanied it. It can also identify someone as a companion without saying that the companion owns anything involved in the journey. The Setswana translation needs to keep those roles apart even if the same nouns are repeated.
For a short travel update, determine how many events the message asserts and which participants belong to each event. Then distinguish a companion from an owner and a noun list from a sequence of clauses. The cited Setswana contrasts make those decisions concrete: the same written le has more than one use, but it does not erase the relationships made explicit by the Divehi source.
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