Welsh to Samoan: my does not specify every kind of possessive relationship
Welsh possession is not a complete target classification
Welsh Universal Dependencies illustrates fy nhŷ, my house, as a dependent personal form followed by a mutated noun. This establishes a possessor relationship without independently spelling out every distinction that another language may require within possession.
Jens Hopperdietzel and Artemis Alexiadou’s Samoan research distinguishes genitive a and o in the nominal domain. Their discussion associates o with relationships including body parts and part–whole connections, and a with relationships including initiated or transitory possession. Some nouns permit either depending on the relationship involved.
For an original Welsh description, compare a person’s hand with an object that the person acquired for a temporary task. Translating both through a single fixed rule for fy would overlook the relationship the Samoan construction needs to express. The point is not to judge which object matters more to the speaker, but to identify how the source connects possessor and possessed entity.
A Welsh personal form can instead refer to an action’s participant
The Welsh overview contrasts possession with object-related use of a dependent form, giving fy ngweld for seeing me. The personal form does not identify the owner of a thing called seeing. It identifies a participant in the event.
The Samoan study separately examines constructions in which actions are expressed as nouns. Its findings show that the marking of participants in those constructions depends on their grammatical relationships; a possessive-looking marker is not sufficient evidence of ordinary material ownership.
For an original Welsh account, distinguish someone seeing the writer from the writer’s own act of seeing somebody else. These descriptions reverse the writer’s role. A Samoan translation using an action-related noun must preserve that role rather than infer it from the mere presence of an a-type or o-type expression. The target analysis is more specific than replacing every source personal form with one possessive equivalent.
This also explains why a source phrase cannot be interpreted from the personal element alone. The Welsh verb noun and the construction containing it determine whether the writer is affected, acting, or possessing something. Recover that source relationship before evaluating the target’s participant marking.
A different marker can preserve the same person
The Samoan researchers distinguish full nominal participants from subject clitics in their analysis of action nominalizations. Their study documents that these do not simply obey one uniform marking pattern across all verb types. The description also acknowledges register and speaker variation.
A Welsh reader should therefore not treat every target marker change as evidence that a different person has been introduced. In an original narrative, a person may own an object, act on another object, and later become the affected participant of a different event. Their identity remains constant while their grammatical relationship changes.
Conversely, retaining one familiar personal-looking form everywhere is not proof that the Welsh reference was preserved. The decisive distinction is between who the person is and what relationship the source gives them in each phrase. Samoan can express that relationship differently when the phrase concerns possession, an action’s actor, or an affected participant.
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