Welsh to Northern Kurdish: pronoun case, past encounters and reflexive ownership
Welsh pronoun forms must be interpreted in their construction
The official Welsh Foundation guide shows prepositions changing with their participants: ata i refers to me as the recipient in a writing example, while ato fe and ati hi refer to other recipients. The person and the relationship are both part of interpreting the phrase.
Kurmanji does not reproduce this through the same Welsh-style prepositional paradigm. Thackston’s original reference grammar distinguishes direct and oblique pronouns and shows that their distribution depends on the construction. A target pronoun should not be chosen solely by finding the nearest English gloss for the Welsh form.
For a Welsh account involving two people, establish who performs the action and who is affected before constructing the Northern Kurdish clause. An inflected Welsh preposition may identify one role, but the corresponding target reference has to fit the whole Kurmanji construction rather than retain the source shape.
The pronoun pattern can change between seeing now and seeing in the past
Thackston gives Tu min dibînî? for a present question about seeing the speaker, but Min tu dîtî for the speaker having seen the addressee. In the latter, the first-person actor uses an oblique form and the affected addressee uses a direct form. The grammatical role cannot be identified by treating min as permanently equivalent to an English object pronoun.
The Welsh Foundation guide presents person distinctions across its own verb paradigms. A change of time in a Welsh report does not automatically explain the target’s case choices through a matching change in Welsh pronoun spelling. Kurmanji requires its own analysis of transitivity and the verbal construction.
When the Welsh writer reports a past encounter, preserve which person saw which. Do not reverse the event because the Kurmanji actor appears in a form that served as an object in another example. Conversely, do not force the past construction into the present question’s pronoun pattern simply to keep the target words visually consistent.
Ordinary possession and the actor’s own possession differ
Thackston contrasts ordinary kitêba min, my book, with reflexive possession using xwe when the possession refers to the relevant subject. The reflexive takes its interpretation from the actor rather than expressing one fixed person independently. His discussion also specifies the logical actor for past transitive constructions.
The Welsh possessive table distinguishes fy, dy, ei, ein, eich and eu with their respective mutation patterns. These source choices establish whose belongings are meant, but they do not by themselves choose ordinary versus reflexive possession in every Kurmanji sentence.
If the Welsh source describes someone seeing their own book, retain the connection between actor and owner. If the owner is somebody else, retain that difference. This direction therefore combines three separate tasks: recovering Welsh participant reference, selecting the target case pattern for the event, and preserving whether possession points back to the actor. Resolving only the owner’s identity without checking the target clause can still produce the wrong relationship.
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