German to Welsh: a birth statement uses cael with a matching personal form
A German passive is a whole predicate, not the word werden alone
German werden can form a passive with a participle, but can also express a future or occur lexically with the meaning become. A Welsh translation must distinguish these uses before selecting its predicate. A German statement that someone was born reports an event affecting that person; it does not mean that the person became the actor who gave birth, nor that the event is still a future plan.
The official South Wales Foundation grammar guide illustrates birth statements using a form of cael, a matching personal form, and the verbnoun with its appropriate mutation. This is a target construction to read as a unit. A separately visible personal element between the auxiliary and the verbnoun does not introduce another child or parent.
The beginning of the verbnoun can change with the person
The guide gives Ces i fy ngeni for “I was born.” Its third-person examples contrast Cafodd e ei eni with Cafodd hi ei geni, for a male and female referent. The differing beginning of the birth verbnoun belongs to the grammatical construction. It should not be corrected to a single unchanged dictionary spelling merely because German geboren keeps its beginning across comparable personal references.
This provides a practical way to read a German family history translated into Welsh. A sentence about a man’s birthplace and one about a woman’s birthplace concern the same kind of event, but the target verbnoun may appear differently after the personal form. That change does not mean the second sentence suddenly describes a different action. The auxiliary, personal reference, and mutation identify the construction together.
The personal element refers to the affected person, not an owner of birth
German first-person ich and third-person er or sie identify different subjects of a birth statement. In the Welsh construction, the matching personal form maintains that connection inside the predicate. Interpreting fy or ei only through an isolated possessive translation such as my or his would miss its function here. The result still says that the subject was born, rather than that someone owns a birth or a child.
Compare the source meanings “I was born in that town” and “She was brought up in Wales.” The Foundation guide presents birth and upbringing as examples of this passive pattern, with the verbnoun identifying which event is described. A target that preserves the personal construction but selects the wrong action would change a biographical fact. Likewise, copying the same person marker across a German paragraph that moves from a parent to the writer could attribute the birthplace to the wrong person. The German passive supplies the affected participant and event; the Welsh cael construction expresses them through a coordinated set of forms. Its person agreement and initial mutation should be assessed together, rather than aligned separately with each word in the German auxiliary-plus-participle sequence.
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