Greek to Divehi: self-reference need not become a special target pronoun
Follow the same person through both roles
Greek has reflexive expressions such as τον εαυτό του for reference to oneself as the affected participant. The Centre for the Greek Language explains that these connect a person acting with that same person undergoing the action. A Divehi translation must preserve the shared identity, but does not need to reproduce the source as an independently equivalent reflexive-pronoun phrase in every construction.
Gnanadesikan describes Divehi as lacking a special ordinary unemphatic reflexive pronoun series. Its mirror example names Aisha in both relevant positions while meaning that she saw herself. Repeating a name in such a target sentence is therefore not necessarily a failure to replace it with a pronoun, nor evidence that two people share the same name. It can express the self-directed relationship that the Greek marks differently.
Personally doing something is different from acting on oneself
Greek also has emphatic expressions identifying the person themselves and expressions meaning alone or by oneself. The official pronoun lesson treats these separately from the reflexive series. That distinction matters when choosing Divehi wording: a person performing a task personally need not be the task’s object, and a person acting without assistance need not act on their own body or possessions.
Divehi amilla-aṣ̊ can function emphatically with a self-related interpretation, including onto oneself or by oneself in the grammar’s discussion. Its presence cannot settle every distinction without the surrounding predicate. If the Greek source says that someone injured themselves, a target expression merely emphasizing that they acted independently could lose the affected participant. Conversely, adding a self-directed object to a Greek statement about doing something alone could change the event entirely.
One’s own is not the same as every Greek possessive
The Greek lesson distinguishes weak genitive possessives from reflexive expressions and gives το βιβλίο της as a possessive book phrase. In this construction, the owner must be resolved separately from whoever performs the action in the surrounding clause. A translation should not infer self-ownership merely because the source uses a familiar third-person genitive or because a reflexive expression appeared elsewhere nearby.
Divehi timāge is particularly unsuitable as a universal shortcut for own. Gnanadesikan describes it in generic expressions involving an unspecified person and explicitly distinguishes its distribution from a broadly anaphoric reflexive possessive. A specific Greek owner therefore does not automatically license that target expression. Determine whether the source identifies a particular owner, speaks generically of one’s property, emphasizes personal participation, or makes the actor and affected person identical. These are four related but distinct relationships. Divehi may retain a name, use an ordinary personal expression or employ an emphatic construction to preserve them; a repeated lexical self substitute cannot reliably serve them all. The source reflexive relation must remain clear even when the target sentence contains no obvious word corresponding to self.
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