Welsh to Divehi: changed word edges and vowels that must stay written
Welsh changes beginnings; Divehi can expose a hidden ending
Welsh speakers are familiar with a word taking a different initial inside a phrase. In dy dad and fy nhad, the noun for father changes after different possessives. The lexical relationship survives the change. Reading a Divehi translation also requires recognizing related word forms, but a Welsh mutation rule will not explain every target alternation.
Maniku’s etymological vocabulary describes Divehi stems whose final consonant becomes apparent under inflection. Its example for hand is aiy, written އަތް, with related forms athun and athaai. The apparent change is at the other end of the word from Welsh dad/nhad, and it belongs to Divehi morphology. Do not replace a longer target form with the short dictionary form merely to make the spelling look familiar.
Another example is maa, flower, with inflected malaai and malun. A consonant visible in the longer forms can therefore be part of the word’s behavior rather than an accidental insertion. This is especially helpful when a Welsh phrase has already supplied the relationship between its nouns: the Divehi translation may express that relationship through forms that do not resemble a word-for-word list.
The script reversal does not reverse every character
Thaana, the script used for modern Divehi, runs from right to left. Unlike connected Arabic writing, Unicode describes it as noncursive. Welsh source text runs left to right, so a translated paragraph can look radically reorganized even when its words are in the intended target order. That visual difference should not be corrected by manually reversing letters.
Numbers provide a specific exception within the new direction. Unicode states that European digits are commonly used and display left to right within Thaana. A quantity embedded in a Divehi sentence can therefore run in the opposite direction from the surrounding prose. Its order should remain the number’s order, rather than being made to imitate the paragraph’s direction.
Small vowel signs are obligatory writing
Welsh writes vowels as letters, including w and y in appropriate words, and uses marks such as the circumflex in tŷ. Thaana instead combines consonants with vowel signs or the null-vowel sign called sukun. Unicode explains that vowel writing is obligatory. Small marks above or below the main characters are consequently part of the word, not optional decoration that can be discarded after copying.
Maniku records fen, ފެން, for water. The example combines a visible vowel sign with a final sukun. A Welsh reader cannot reconstruct its pronunciation by treating the large letter shapes alone as a complete alphabetic sequence. Recognizing that difference makes the script transition more intelligible: the source and target both encode vowel information, but they distribute it differently across the written word.
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