Divehi to Telugu: a dative participant is not always someone receiving an object
A source ending can mark the person who can act
Divehi dative marking occurs with recipients, but also with experiencers and participants in ability constructions. Gnanadesikan describes general ability through an involitive verb and a dative participant. A translator who interprets every dative expression as an English-style to someone could therefore misread the person who is able to perform an action as its recipient. The semantic role must be established from the predicate, not from the case label alone.
The grammar’s ability example contains ēnā-aṣ̊, a third-person reference with a dative ending, in an account of being able to participate in a team. That person is the potential participant. The source is not saying that someone else participates toward them. A Telugu translation should retain who possesses the ability, even if the target expresses that relationship through a construction different from a literal rendering of the source verb.
Telugu also has noncanonical subjects, but the categories are not identical
The Telugu Universal Dependencies documentation explicitly recognizes noncanonical subjects, including dative nominals. This supports an important practical caution: a target dative phrase should not automatically be ruled out merely because it refers to the central experiencer rather than an ordinary recipient. However, the existence of dative subjects in both descriptions does not prove that every Divehi dative can be carried across unchanged. The particular target predicate must license its construction.
Divehi itself leaves the theoretical subject status of some dative phrases open to discussion. The grammar distinguishes involuntary actors, passive experiencers and holders of abilities, and notes that analyses can differ. A useful translation need not resolve that theoretical debate, but it must preserve the distinctions among the events. Knowing something, finding oneself doing something and being capable of doing something are not equivalent simply because the relevant person bears the same source case ending.
An unmarked source object may need a visible target ending
The opposite problem arises with ordinary Divehi direct objects. The source direct case is unmarked and can serve both subject and object. Telugu uses accusative morphology, with ni/nu identified in Messick and Raghotham’s analysis. That study describes accusative marking on human objects and on specific nonhuman objects. A target suffix can thus be required even when the source noun has no matching overt object ending.
These two observations have to be applied together. Do not manufacture a recipient from a Divehi dative experiencer, and do not discard Telugu object marking merely because the source object looks bare. In an ability sentence involving a person and a particular item, first identify who can act and what is acted upon. Then choose a Telugu predicate and noun forms expressing those roles. The appearance of a target case ending adds grammatical structure, not necessarily a new participant or a new meaning. Conversely, retaining the same-looking source participant expression cannot compensate for selecting a predicate that changes ability into an actual completed action.
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