Divehi to Upper Sorbian: one’s own is not a universal reflexive replacement
The source self-expression needs its actual reading
Gnanadesikan cautions that Divehi timāge, one’s own, is used with a generic or unspecified subject rather than as a general way to refer back to a previously mentioned person. The same form can also participate in expressions concerning relatives. A translator should therefore not equate every occurrence with an anaphoric possessive tied to the nearest named person.
Stone describes Upper Sorbian reflexive personal and possessive constructions, including swój. Their interpretation commonly relates to the clause’s subject, with qualifications involving logical subjects and understood subjects of infinitives. Selecting this target material requires establishing the relevant person rather than applying a dictionary substitution for own.
A self-directed event can require a case distinction
Upper Sorbian distinguishes myć so, wash oneself, from dowolić sej, permit oneself. Stone identifies the reflexive forms in these examples as accusative and dative respectively. A source meaning involving oneself therefore does not determine one identical Upper Sorbian reflexive form regardless of the predicate.
Divehi, by contrast, has no special unemphatic reflexive pronoun series in Gnanadesikan’s description. Self-reference can be implicit or expressed through repetition. When the source repeats a person’s name in a mirror description, interpret the two mentions as the same referent if the context supports that reading, then choose the target construction and the case it requires. Repetition alone is not a target case rule.
A reflexive-looking target verb may be lexical
Stone also notes Upper Sorbian verbs that are reflexive in form without being self-directed in meaning, including expressions for fear, prayer and seeming. Thus a source describing somebody’s fear should not be expanded into fearing oneself merely because its correct target verb includes reflexive material.
This qualification is especially useful alongside Divehi’s ability to leave self-reference implicit. Absence of a source self-word does not prove that a target reflexive form is an addition to the message. Conversely, adding such a form to any target verb is not a safe method of recovering every implicit self-reading. The selected Upper Sorbian verb and its lexical construction must support the intended event.
Independent action and action on oneself must stay distinct
Divehi amilla-aṣ̊ can emphasize either acting on oneself or acting by oneself. Gnanadesikan distinguishes these uses. Completing a task without help is consequently not equivalent to directing the action toward one’s own person, even when the same emphatic source expression is available in both contexts.
Before producing Upper Sorbian, determine whether the source concerns ownership, generic advice, self-directed action or independent performance. Then identify the clause participant relevant to the target reflexive and the case or lexical form required by the predicate. A generic source own-expression should not acquire an unintended named owner; an independence statement should not become a self-directed event; and a lexical target reflexive should not be read as an extra participant. These distinctions preserve the source relationship while allowing Upper Sorbian to express it through grammatical material absent from the Divehi surface form. The source account concerns northern and standard Malé usage.
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