Dogri to Amharic: distinguish respectful address from gender
Dogri tu and tuss do not select the same Amharic choices
Sawhney’s Dogri description contrasts familiar tu with a respectful singular use of tuss, which also has plural uses. The Amharic Peace Corps manual separates masculine singular antä, feminine singular anči, polite ïrswo and plural ïnnantä. A translation therefore needs to distinguish the number of listeners, the address relationship and, for the relevant singular forms, the listener’s gender. A single Dogri pronoun cannot always settle all three.
In a Dogri farewell to one familiar person, the pronoun can establish familiarity without identifying gender. The Amharic manual gives different take-care forms for a masculine and a feminine singular addressee. Selecting one solely from Dogri tu would add information that this pronoun itself does not provide. The context may supply it through a named interlocutor or an earlier description; otherwise it remains a genuine gap rather than a licence to assume a male listener.
A respectful singular is not a group
The Dogri description explicitly allows respectful tuss for one person. The Amharic manual similarly distinguishes a polite addressee from an ordinary plural group. Thus a Dogri message directed respectfully to one teacher should not automatically become an Amharic message addressed to several teachers. Respect and participant count are separate parts of the communication.
Compare the original English scenarios of a pupil wishing one elder a safe departure and a host saying farewell to several guests. They can motivate different Amharic choices even if Dogri uses a related plural-looking address pattern. The translation must retain whether a single person or the whole group is being addressed. Conversely, replacing a group farewell with a singular gendered form can exclude listeners who were included in the source.
Do not use any feminine agreement as proof about the listener
Dogri grammatical gender can occur on nouns and verbs. Sawhney’s transitive example involving Ram eating food has a feminine perfect form associated with the feminine food noun. This illustrates why a feminine form somewhere in the sentence cannot simply be treated as a label for the person being addressed. Its agreement relationship must be identified first.
Imagine a Dogri conversation in which someone discusses food and then turns to a guest with a farewell. The gender of the food noun is not evidence for choosing the guest’s Amharic address form. Nor does a respectful reference to a third person determine the form used to the listener. Follow the actual speech roles: speaker, addressee and person discussed. Once those are established, the Amharic farewell can express the intended respect and number without importing a gender decision from an unrelated Dogri agreement pattern. The two languages both mark interpersonal distinctions, but they distribute them across different grammatical choices.
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