Welsh to Yucatec Maya: a personal form does not always identify a possessor
Recover the Welsh relationship before choosing a target personal pattern
Welsh Universal Dependencies contrasts fy nhŷ, my house, with fy ngweld, seeing me. The same dependent personal form occurs in a possession-related phrase and an object-related construction. A Welsh-to-Yucatec translation cannot decide the writer’s role from fy alone.
Manuel Andrade’s Yucatec grammar distinguishes personal sets that he labels Classes A, B, and C. His Class A forms occur as possessives and as subjects of certain verbal constructions. These labels describe his grammatical analysis; they are not a division of people into social classes.
For an original Welsh account, compare the writer’s house with somebody seeing the writer near the house. The person is the possessor in the first relationship and the perceived participant in the second. A target personal form associated with possession elsewhere should not force an ownership interpretation when its actual construction expresses an event.
A suffix may identify an object rather than the actor
Andrade’s Class B set occurs as subjects in some verbal constructions and as direct objects. His analysed example u haʦ’enoːbeʔ means they hit me; its first-person component identifies the affected person, while another component conveys the plural actor.
A Welsh writer should therefore not assume that a personal element attached after the Yucatec verb names its subject. The source predicate and the target construction must establish which role it represents. This matters when the Welsh source contains several personal references, including a dependent object form that is less visually prominent than a separate subject pronoun.
For an original Welsh narrative, distinguish the writer seeing a group from that group seeing the writer. Both involve the same people and perception-related vocabulary. Swapping actor and object changes who witnessed the event. A target ending cannot be interpreted independently of the surrounding personal marking merely because it resembles a form learned in an intransitive sentence.
An independent form can emphasize or identify a recipient
Andrade gives his Class C forms both emphatic and indirect-object functions. The placement and construction distinguish a contrast such as it is you who acts from a relationship such as to you. His description also records alternative ways of expressing third-person recipients.
The Welsh Foundation guide illustrates personal prepositions, including telling-related wrtho i. A Welsh-to-Yucatec translation must preserve that recipient role without automatically turning the writer into the person performing the telling. An emphatic statement about the writer is a different claim from a statement that someone told the writer something.
Andrade’s account is historical descriptive work with its own phonetic transcription and documented speech variation. Its patterns are useful evidence about these relationships, rather than instructions to normalize every modern output to the printed transcription. Interpret the target’s complete personal construction against the Welsh source: whose thing, who acted, who was affected, and who received the communication are different questions.
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