Dogri to Afrikaans: preserve description without copying agreement endings
A change in the Dogri adjective need not add a new quality
Sawhney’s original Dogri morphological description gives t͡ʃəŋɡ-ɑ with a singular boy and t͡ʃəŋɡ-e with plural boys. It also gives feminine singular and plural forms. The adjective continues to express good while its ending participates in grammatical agreement. The visible differences are not four separate evaluations of the people described.
The Afrikaans Universal Dependencies documentation treats adjective forms partly through the difference between attributive and predicative use, alongside degree. That is a different organizing question from copying every Dogri gender, number and case ending into a corresponding Afrikaans ending.
For a Dogri description of several good pupils, retain both the plural group and the positive description. Do not turn an agreement difference into stronger praise, and do not make a plural group singular merely because the target adjective lacks a visibly matching plural shape. The participants and the description must be interpreted separately before they are assembled in Afrikaans.
Describing a person differs from describing how that person walks
Sawhney also illustrates a Dogri manner expression with t̪im-ɑ and t̪im-i in instructions involving Ram and Rani. The article describes gender and number inflection for this class of adverbs. A reader must therefore distinguish grammatical variation in a manner expression from a change in the manner itself.
The Afrikaans UD account lists degree as the inflectional feature of adverbs. South Africa’s official Afrikaans curriculum gives stadig among manner adverbs. A change between male and female participants in the Dogri example does not, by itself, require an Afrikaans meaning other than slowly.
This is useful in translating instructions addressed to different people. Two source lines can vary morphologically while asking for the same pace. If the translator treats every differing ending as an independent lexical instruction, one person may accidentally be told to act slowly and another to act carefully. The source relationship concerns who receives the instruction, while the manner can remain constant.
A description such as a slow walker and an instruction to walk slowly should also remain distinct. One characterizes a person through a noun phrase; the other modifies an action. Identifying that difference prevents a familiar-looking descriptive word from being placed in the wrong target construction.
Attributive and predicative forms remain a real Afrikaans distinction
The official Afrikaans curriculum contrasts die lang man with die man is lank: a tall man versus the man being tall. The change between lang and lank accompanies a change in construction. Afrikaans therefore should not be approached as though descriptive words never change form at all.
Sawhney’s Dogri examples similarly distinguish a noun-modifying description from an adjectival predicate. In translation, preserve whether the writer identifies a person through a property or makes a statement about that person. This distinction remains useful even when the source and target organize their endings differently.
The goal is not to reproduce the number of suffixes visible in the Dogri phrase. Keep the people, their number, the quality or manner described, and the difference between description and assertion. Those decisions explain why a faithful Afrikaans rendering may have fewer agreement distinctions yet still require its own appropriate adjective form.
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