Divehi to Welsh: a possessive can change the beginning of the owned noun
The owner’s gender can matter even when the source pronoun does not show it
Fritz describes standard Divehi pronouns as lacking a formal masculine-versus-feminine distinction. She separately notes limited gender traces in the Fua Mulaku vernacular, so the standard observation should not be extended indiscriminately to every island variety. A standard source reference can identify someone without giving the gender information required by a particular Welsh possessive expression.
The Welsh Academy Dictionary’s morphology chapter distinguishes ei used for a male possessor from ei used for a female possessor through their different effects on the following word. It contrasts ei ben and ei phen for a male and female person’s head. The possessive word has the same spelling, while the noun’s initial consonant shows a grammatical difference.
For a Divehi description of someone’s head or another possessed item, an apparently small Welsh spelling change may consequently concern the owner rather than a new object. The source pronoun cannot select the relevant mutation solely by being third person. Establish the intended person from the actual source context before interpreting the target form.
Possessor number is separate from the number of items
The BBC Cymru Fyw language guide distinguishes singular ei from plural eu. Its examples contrast a singular person’s cat with plural farmers’ sheep. That is an owner distinction; it does not license selecting eu merely because the Divehi source lists several owned things.
A Divehi sentence about one person’s several books and another about several people’s shared book do not have the same ownership structure. Welsh must retain that difference even if the source expresses possession through an ending rather than a separately written possessive. Count the owners independently of the items when assessing the target expression.
The BBC guide also preserves ei in the established ei gilydd expression. This cautions against globally replacing every visible ei with eu whenever several people appear in a source sentence. An expression’s construction can control its form, so a mechanical plural substitution is insufficient.
An extra source location contrast does not identify male or female ownership
Gnanadesikan gives the Divehi human forms ēnā and mīnā in her third-person discussion, relating them to distance or discourse reference. That distinction can help keep two people apart, but it is not itself the male-versus-female distinction relevant to Welsh ei mutation.
In a Divehi account where one person is nearby and another is elsewhere, preserve who owns which item before choosing the Welsh construction. Collapsing those references into a single owner would lose information even if the mutation were correctly formed. Conversely, assigning gender from the location contrast would add unsupported information. The target must coordinate two separate tasks: retaining the source’s reference distinctions and applying the Welsh grammar appropriate to the established possessor.
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