Welsh to Tamil: wishes, liking and the person who experiences a state
Welsh liking and a polite wish are not the same translation problem
The Welsh Foundation guide distinguishes a conditional with hoffi, illustrated by Hoffwn i dalu, I would like to pay. This expresses a wish or preference about an action. It should not automatically become a Tamil statement of liking a person or an object merely because a dictionary connects both expressions with like.
Lehmann’s grammar describes Tamil stative predicates of emotional and mental experience, including piti for liking and teri for knowing. These can assign dative marking to the experiencer. The choice of Tamil construction therefore starts with the meaning of the entire Welsh clause, not the isolated verb root.
In a Welsh service exchange, a polite wish to pay asks to carry out an action. In a personal description, liking someone reports an attitude. A translation that merges them can change a practical request into a statement of affection or preference. Preserve whether the source is about an intended action or an existing state before selecting the Tamil predicate.
A Tamil dative person can be the experiencer rather than a recipient
The Welsh course gives prepositional forms such as ato fe and ati hi in writing and sending contexts. Those identify a person toward whom something is directed. Tamil dative marking, however, also appears in the experience constructions described by Lehmann; its presence does not always identify somebody receiving a transferred object.
One attested example has kumaar-ukku with a predicate meaning knows and a place as the thing known. Kumar is the person with the knowledge. Reading the dative as a simple instruction to add to before the person would misrepresent the relation. A Welsh translation back through such a gloss could wrongly suggest that information was being sent to Kumar.
This distinction helps when a Welsh message combines knowing a place, contacting someone there and sending something. Those events may involve the same people, but the participants have different roles. Tamil case marking must follow the selected predicate’s construction. The Welsh preposition and the Tamil suffix are not interchangeable labels for one universal relation.
A neuter verb form need not describe a neuter person
For the restricted experience predicates discussed in his dative–accusative pattern, Lehmann describes a third-person singular neuter verbal form rather than agreement matching the experiencer. This is a grammatical property of that pattern. It does not assert that a human experiencer has become an inanimate entity.
Welsh explicitly distinguishes fe and hi in the Foundation paradigms. When a sentence about either person becomes a Tamil experience construction, do not force a masculine or feminine verbal ending solely to imitate the Welsh pronoun. First determine whether the Tamil predicate belongs to the restricted pattern being used.
The comparison also prevents a false diagnosis of a translation error. A Tamil form that does not visibly match the Welsh person’s gender may be appropriate in an experience clause, while an ordinary action clause can have different agreement requirements. Check the particular predicate and participant structure rather than apply the experience pattern to every Tamil verb.
Lehmann’s account concerns Modern Literary Tamil. Its cited examples establish the contrast discussed here; they are not a claim that every spoken regional variety uses identical forms. Choose the intended Tamil register without treating literary and conversational presentation as a simple change of font.
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