Divehi to Tahitian: a personal reference can keep its gender neutrality while changing its relationship
The target does not always need an invented he or she
Standard Divehi ēnā refers to a person without dividing into he and she in Fritz’s paradigm. Tahitian personal pronouns also lack grammatical gender in the official teaching description. A translation between these languages therefore does not automatically need to introduce a male or female identification merely because an English explanation would choose he or she.
The Polynésie française reference gives ’ōna for a third-person singular reference and explicitly states that personal pronouns do not mark gender. This is useful for a Divehi account in which the person’s identity is clear but sex is not mentioned. Preserving that reference is different from making the person vague: the conversation can identify exactly who is meant without a gendered pronoun.
Fritz distinguishes standard personal genitive and dative forms, including ēnāge for the owner and ēnāaś for a dative relationship. The same person can therefore occur in several source forms depending on their role. The lack of gender contrast does not imply that all these grammatical relationships are interchangeable in the target.
A recipient is not automatically the actor or owner
The Tahitian teaching reference illustrates iāna from the preposition ia and the third-person singular pronoun. It also gives iā’u for the first person, compared with the subject form vau or au. These examples show a relationship between the construction and the pronoun form. They are not an instruction to replace every Divehi case ending with the same standalone Tahitian word.
Imagine a Divehi message in which one person sends an item to another. The person performing the sending and the recipient are different participants even if neither pronoun marks sex. A Tahitian result can preserve that useful neutrality while still identifying who receives the item. Omitting the relationship simply because the pronouns are unmarked would leave the transfer unclear.
Now compare the original intentions this is that person’s letter and give the letter to that person. The first identifies an owner or association, while the second identifies a recipient of an action. In the Divehi source, a genitive and a dative can help distinguish those relationships. A target translation must not turn ownership into delivery or delivery into ownership merely because both refer back to the same person.
A first-person reference can change viewpoint as well. If a Divehi speaker asks that something be given to them, translating only the personal label I without its relationship to the giving would fail to express the intended destination. The Tahitian reference’s contrast between vau and iā’u provides a concrete reminder that identity and sentence role must be expressed together.
This comparison is valuable for short messages with several pronouns. Keep each person identifiable, retain whether they act, receive, or own, and introduce no sex distinction that neither source nor target requires. The grammatical relationship can demand a different target construction even while the personal reference remains equally unmarked for gender in both languages.
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