Spanish to Tigrinya: the verb can distinguish a group of women from a group of men
Spanish plural verbs can leave gender elsewhere
Spanish dijeron can report what a group said without marking that group as masculine or feminine in the verb itself. Pronouns or surrounding nouns may supply the distinction. Tigrinya can incorporate gender into plural verbal forms, so omitting the Spanish subject does not necessarily leave an equally neutral target verb available.
Tesfay Tewolde Yohannes contrasts nȁgȁr-a-ni with nȁgȁr-u-ni, describing respectively a female plural group and a male plural group telling the speaker something. The final -ni refers to me in both examples. The change before it concerns the people who told, not the person receiving their words.
Keep the actor’s gender separate from the recipient
A Spanish statement saying that women told a man something still has women as its speaking group. The recipient’s gender cannot determine the Tigrinya actor ending. Conversely, a woman recounting what men told her does not turn the group into a feminine subject merely because the sentence represents her first-person experience. The two participant roles must remain distinct.
The RAE distinguishes verbal agreement in person and number from nominal and predicative gender agreement. That helps identify where Spanish may provide the relevant evidence. A feminine adjective attached to the people speaking can be informative; a feminine noun naming the information they passed on cannot automatically identify the speakers.
When the Spanish source is just a short verb and object pronoun, the preceding question may supply the missing group. A reply about what some sisters said and a reply about what some brothers said could share the same Spanish verb spelling. The target contrast documented in the research requires knowing which of those groups the reply continues to discuss.
Direct address introduces another distinction
The Tigrinya study also gives nȁgȁr-kɨna-ni for a female plural addressee group telling the speaker. This differs from the third-person female plural example: those people are now being addressed rather than discussed. Gender alone therefore cannot identify the correct target construction.
Spanish ustedes is especially relevant because, as the RAE explains, it refers to addressees while taking grammatical third-person agreement. A Spanish third-person plural verb with ustedes does not mean that the message is about an absent group. Reading its actual conversational role prevents a target form intended for they from replacing one intended for you.
The RAE further notes that American Spanish uses ustedes for informal as well as formal plural address. The source pronoun therefore does not establish respect by itself. The comparison here concerns who is being addressed or described and the gender distinction present in the cited target forms, rather than a complete account of Tigrinya social address.
These examples retain the linguistic transliteration and segmentation used in the research. They demonstrate how a target verb can distinguish information that Spanish distributes across a subject phrase, pronoun and context. Before translating a brief report, identify the speaking group and its relation to the narrator; otherwise the same Spanish surface form can lead to materially different Tigrinya readings.
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