Welsh to Dari: tracking people, recipients and the information a question requests
A Welsh gender distinction may disappear from the Dari pronoun
The Open University’s Welsh course distinguishes Pwy yw e? from Pwy yw hi?, asking who he or she is. In Entezar’s grammar of spoken Kabuli Dari, the third-person pronoun u covers he, she and it. A Dari translation can therefore identify the same person without reproducing the Welsh gender distinction in its pronoun.
This does not mean the original person has changed. It means the two languages distribute information differently. In a Welsh exchange about one already identified visitor, the gendered pronoun may help track the person. A corresponding Dari sentence can rely on the established topic. Adding a noun meaning man or woman solely to imitate the Welsh pronoun can make gender more prominent than the original question intended.
Where a Welsh passage alternates between two people, however, replacing both references with an undifferentiated pronoun may make the account difficult to follow. Use the surrounding names or relationships to maintain the distinction. The decision concerns reference in that passage, not a rule that Dari must explicitly state gender whenever Welsh does.
The person who is told something is not the subject who tells it
The Welsh Foundation guide gives inflected forms of wrth used with telling, including wrtho fe and wrthi hi. These forms encode a relationship to the person being told. A translation that keeps only a male or female third-person reference but loses the recipient relation changes the event.
Entezar illustrates a spoken Dari object expression in u mara goft, translated as he or she told me. The example distinguishes the person telling from the person addressed. Its object marking cannot be replaced by a possessive merely because both constructions refer to a person associated with the message.
This is especially relevant when a Welsh note contains several short pronouns: one person sends information, another receives it, and a third may be the subject of the information. Welsh prepositional inflection helps separate those participants. Dari must express the same participant roles through its own construction rather than preserve the Welsh order of short words mechanically.
Question words ask for different missing information
The Welsh course contrasts a name request containing beth and enw with the identity question containing pwy. Entezar’s Dari interrogative discussion likewise distinguishes chi, what, from ki, who. The useful translation unit is nevertheless the complete request: a question about a name needs to keep the requested detail, rather than become an unrestricted question about a person.
A particularly misleading visual coincidence is Welsh chi and the transcription chi in the Dari grammar. Welsh chi is a second-person form; the Dari transcription in the interrogative list means what. Their matching Latin letters do not establish shared meaning or shared grammar. The Dari book uses a transcription of spoken Kabuli forms, not Welsh spelling conventions.
Read those forms in their own sentence before choosing an equivalent. A question addressed politely to someone and a question asking what happened can both contain the letters chi across these materials, while doing entirely different work. Preserving the question’s information gap prevents a superficial spelling match from changing its purpose.
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