Welsh to Danish: owner gender, reflexive possession and clause boundaries
Welsh owner gender is only the first Danish decision
The Open University contrasts ei enw e with ei henw hi, his name and her name. These phrases distinguish the person whose name is meant even though the Welsh possessive ei has the same spelling. The noun form and supporting pronoun contribute to interpreting the complete phrase.
Danish cannot always preserve that relationship simply by choosing hans or hendes. The official sproget.dk guide explains that traditional standard Danish uses sin for possession referring back to a singular subject. An ordinary gendered possessive instead can identify another person. Owner identity must therefore be related to the clause’s subject.
If a Welsh statement describes a woman referring to her own name, establish that relationship before wording it in Danish. If she is referring to another woman’s name, retain the difference. Recovering feminine reference from Welsh is useful, but it does not by itself decide whether the target needs a reflexive possessive.
A changed subject can change the possessive construction
The Welsh course also gives ei rif ffôn e and ei rhif ffôn hi for his and her telephone number. The number noun’s initial form changes in the illustrated phrases; that is grammatical evidence about the source relationship, not a different category of telephone information.
When that phrase is placed inside a longer Danish statement, its syntactic environment matters. The Danish guide contrasts a main-clause subject with the subject of an embedded finite clause and explains that they count as separate clauses for the illustrated possessive choice. A reference back to someone in the surrounding clause does not automatically take sin.
Thus a translation reporting that somebody’s father has joined a service must keep the father as the embedded subject. The Welsh owner clue still identifies whose father he is, but the Danish clause structure determines how the possession is worded. Reorganizing the sentence without reconsidering its possessive can change the apparent owner.
A group owner is different from several owned things
The sproget.dk guide explicitly distinguishes a singular subject with sin from a plural subject with deres in traditional standard usage. It also acknowledges regional variation rather than presenting the guidance as a universal description of every Danish speaker. The relevant number here belongs to the subject-owner.
A Welsh message about one person’s several belongings must therefore be distinguished from one about a group’s belongings. Several telephone numbers do not necessarily imply several owners. Conversely, a single shared number can belong to several people. Determine both counts rather than allowing one to stand in for the other.
This direction requires reading Welsh mutation and pronominal support together, then rebuilding possession inside the Danish clause. The owner’s identity, the subject’s number and the position of any embedded clause are separate pieces of information. Preserving only the male–female contrast of a short Welsh phrase can still produce the wrong relationship once that phrase becomes part of a complete Danish sentence.
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