Welsh to Maithili: one speaker, respectful reference and agreement beyond the subject
Ham can identify one Welsh speaker
Welsh i and ni distinguish a speaker from a group containing the speaker. A Maithili result need not resemble those Welsh forms, or the forms a reader knows from Hindi. Ram Binay Ray’s nominal study lists ham as first-person singular and ham sab as plural. The short target form can therefore represent one person without changing the Welsh message into a statement on behalf of several people.
The practical comparison is grammatical, not visual: Welsh marks the person through its own pronoun and verb patterns, while Maithili identifies it through its own paradigm. A reader checking an introduction should establish whether the source says I or we before interpreting the target. Resemblance to a neighboring language’s plural pronoun is not evidence that the Maithili form is plural here.
Respect can distinguish third-person verb forms
Welsh fe and hi can make a third-person gender contrast explicit. Preeti Kumari’s study of Darbhanga Maithili shows a different contrast in its third-person examples: o sut-əl-khinh uses honorific agreement, while o sut-əl-əi is nonhonorific. Both refer to someone who slept. A changed ending can concern the status of the person discussed rather than that person’s sex.
This observation is specifically scoped to the variety described in the study. Kumari notes that some other Maithili varieties retain restricted natural-gender agreement in third-person contexts. A Welsh-to-Maithili guide should consequently not promise that gender is absent everywhere. The useful question is which distinctions the chosen target variety actually expresses in the sentence.
A Welsh narrative may refer respectfully to a teacher without directly addressing that teacher. Maithili honorific grammar can still matter because respect is not restricted to the word for you. Recover who is being described and how the speaker relates to them before reading an unexpected target ending as an error.
The object can affect the agreement too
Kumari documents Darbhanga constructions in which the object contributes to the verb’s person-and-honorific agreement alongside the subject. Her examples distinguish I saw you with different degrees of respect. A Welsh source can leave the actor unchanged while changing the person seen, and the corresponding Maithili verb form may change with that object.
This differs from simply matching the target verb to the Welsh subject pronoun. The study identifies restrictions: first-person and third-person nonhonorific objects do not trigger the same additional agreement pattern. It would therefore be inaccurate to turn the observation into a rule that every object always controls a second ending.
Welsh ownership clues need Maithili case forms
Welsh possessives such as fy and dy trigger different initial mutations in the following word. Ray’s Maithili study instead presents possessive and other case forms within pronoun paradigms, including genitive marking. The owner must survive translation, but the source mutation is not transferred as a Maithili sound change.
Where Welsh ei distinguishes an owner through the following mutation, identify that reference first. The target pronoun’s case and the surrounding Maithili construction then express the relationship through their own resources.
Language references