Dogri to Armenian: preserve a transfer without copying object gender
A feminine Dogri verb can accompany a masculine giver
Sawhney’s Dogri book-transfer example has an ergative-marked giver, a recipient marked with gi and a feminine singular book, with feminine perfect agreement. Eastern Armenian does not reproduce that masculine/feminine agreement system. Its Universal Dependencies description has no grammatical Gender feature and describes number, person and case separately. A target clause can consequently retain the same transfer without displaying a feminine counterpart to the Dogri verb ending.
An original scenario involving a man giving a book to a woman still contains a man, a woman and a book in Armenian. The lack of gender agreement does not erase those people’s identities. Their roles and any lexical information about them need to survive independently of an ending that Armenian does not require.
Dogri ne and gi cannot be treated as Armenian case endings
The Eastern Armenian account describes nominal subjects in nominative and core objects with nominative or dative marking according to the construction. A Dogri ergative-marked giver should therefore not be translated by inventing an Armenian ergative form simply because the source marks the actor separately. The case systems do not provide identical slots.
Likewise, locating gi in a Dogri transfer example helps identify the recipient, but it does not prescribe the spelling of an Armenian recipient expression. Reconstruct the giving event first. A direct object and recipient may both be associated with case patterns that require the complete predicate to distinguish their functions. Do not infer that two similarly marked target phrases must represent the same kind of participant.
Person associated with possession is another layer
The Armenian documentation distinguishes person and number features associated with possessors from ordinary nominal features. This is relevant if a Dogri transfer identifies a possessed object, such as my book, rather than an unspecified book. Sawhney describes Dogri genitive agreement with the possessed head noun. Its form should not be mistaken for a label identifying the Armenian owner’s person or number.
For example, a source can describe one speaker’s book being given to several recipients, or a group’s book being given to one recipient. Those are independent counts. The Armenian wording must retain the owner and the recipient relationship without conflating either with the object’s number. A change in Dogri head agreement is not enough to decide that an owner has become plural. Conversely, a target form encoding a possessor does not necessarily identify who receives the object. Follow giver, recipient, possessed item and owner as separate roles where the source distinguishes them. The translation can then rebuild the Armenian clause without depending on a gender contrast or ergative category that belongs to the Dogri construction.
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