Afrikaans to Dogri: possession and participant roles need their own grammar
Afrikaans se does not select one unchanging Dogri word
Afrikaans expresses possession with constructions such as die kind se boek. Dogri genitive forms include dā, de and dī, with agreement connected to the possessed noun. Replacing every Afrikaans se with a single fixed target form would ignore information that Dogri grammar requires.
The same owner can therefore occur with different possessive forms when the possessed item changes. Identify whether the phrase concerns that person's book, house or several belongings. Do not decide the ending from the owner's gender alone. The Afrikaans sequence tells you who owns what, but the Dogri noun and its grammatical context supply additional agreement information. Keep the entire possessive phrase intact while checking it.
My huis contains no visible masculine ending
Afrikaans my remains unchanged in my huis. In the documented Dogri phrase mer-ā kār, ‘my house’, the possessive form agrees with a masculine noun. The ending does not say that the speaker is male. A woman referring to the same house does not change the house's grammatical gender merely by becoming its owner.
This distinction is useful when adapting a saved phrase. Replacing the object noun may require reviewing the possessive and other agreeing words even when Afrikaans my looks exactly as it did before. Conversely, changing the speaker's name is not a reason to replace every grammatical masculine form with a feminine one. First identify which word each ending belongs with.
Prepositions can become relationships expressed after the noun
Afrikaans commonly puts relationship words before a noun, as in met die kind or onder die tafel. Dogri uses postpositions, following the expression they relate to the rest of the clause, and the preceding noun can take an oblique form. The target may therefore organise the same relationship in a visibly different order.
For directions or a delivery description, distinguish being under something, moving from somewhere and being accompanied by somebody. These are not interchangeable uses of a generic location word. Do not move a Dogri postposition to the front simply to imitate the Afrikaans phrase. A changed noun ending beside it can also be required grammar rather than a different item or place name.
Do not read the last ending as the sender's identity
Dogri verb forms can carry aspect, gender and number information together. Their agreement relationships do not reduce to copying the gender of an Afrikaans hy or sy into the last word. In a completed-action description, establish who acts, what is affected and who receives it before editing an unfamiliar ending.
Dogri's default clause organisation is subject–object–verb, though other orders occur. The final verb is not evidence that the sentence has accidentally become a question or a fragment. The Devanagari script also needs to be read as Dogri rather than automatically as Hindi. Preserve its vowel signs and consonant distinctions; an Afrikaans-letter transcription or a familiar Hindi replacement may hide the very grammatical information needed to understand the result.
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