Welsh to Sinhala: deliberate listening, experienced sound and written register
Hearing and listening do not assign the same role
A Welsh account of someone noticing a sound and a Welsh instruction to listen describe different relationships to the event. Carmen Jany’s study of spoken Sinhala gives ahannǝ for listening and æhennǝ for hearing within its discussion of volitive and involitive verbs. The target choice should preserve that difference rather than treating the two actions as stylistic synonyms.
Her example maṭə sindu æhe-nəwa means that the speaker hears music and marks the experiencer with the dative. The person experiencing the sound is not necessarily presented through the same grammatical pattern as a deliberate actor. A Welsh source’s first-person reference therefore does not automatically require an ordinary target nominative pronoun in every perception statement.
The study explicitly cautions that the morphology and voluntary meaning do not correspond perfectly for all verbs. It would be inaccurate to derive every Sinhala involuntary event by applying one vowel change. The attested hearing-and-listening contrast helps identify the intended role; it is not a universal word-building instruction.
A Welsh personal preposition is not a Sinhala case label
Welsh can express a relation to a person through an inflected preposition. The Academy grammar lists iddo and iddi for third-person forms of i, while the Foundation guide illustrates ato fe and ati hi in statements about writing to someone. These source constructions identify relationships that Sinhala may distribute through its own noun and verb forms.
Jany’s analysis emphasizes semantic and lexical factors in spoken Sinhala case marking, including animacy and definiteness. A Welsh phrase describing a recipient, an experiencer or an affected object therefore needs its role understood before selecting a target form. Translating every Welsh preposition with one fixed case would confuse relationships that the target distinguishes.
Spoken grammar and formal written grammar are different choices
The FSI Sinhala course explains that spelling, vocabulary and grammar differ between spoken and literary Sinhala, and identifies its own focus as spoken language. Jany’s findings likewise explicitly concern spoken Sinhala. A Welsh conversational message can draw useful comparisons from these sources, but their constructions should not be advertised as an exhaustive prescription for every formal written document.
Welsh also has literary and conversational forms, as the Academy grammar notes in discussing impersonal constructions. A translation decision about register should therefore be deliberate on both sides. The fact that a Sinhala expression is documented in spoken usage does not make it defective; the fact that it appears in Sinhala script does not automatically make it a literary form.
A new script changes where vowel information appears
Welsh uses vowel letters and marks such as the circumflex in tŷ. The Sinhala script course instead teaches independent vowel symbols and vowel signs combined with consonants, including signs positioned around the base character. A Welsh reader cannot assess completeness by looking only for a horizontal sequence of separate vowel letters.
Those smaller signs belong to the written syllable. Preserve their relationship to the consonant rather than stripping them to make the target resemble a simpler alphabetic line. The source meaning remains the same even though the target distributes its sound information differently across the glyphs.
Language references