Dogri to Azerbaijani: distinguish noun agreement from owner suffixes
Dogri genitive endings and Azerbaijani suffixes answer different questions
Sawhney describes Dogri genitive markers as agreeing with the head noun in gender, number and case. Azerbaijani possession, in the Peace Corps introduction, combines a genitive possessor with a possessive suffix on the possessed noun. A translator should not assign an owner’s person from the shape of a Dogri agreeing genitive ending. First identify who owns or is related to the thing, then identify the thing itself.
The Azerbaijani examples distinguish kitabım, my book, from kitabımız, our book. That difference concerns the possessor’s number. A change among Dogri genitive forms can instead concern the gender or number of the head noun. Treating every change of possessive shape as a change from one owner to several would therefore distort an otherwise simple inventory of somebody’s belongings.
A changed vowel can follow the noun rather than a new owner
The Azerbaijani course shows several vowel variants of possessive suffixes, as in its first-person examples for book, notebook and face. These are not separate first-person owners. A different suffix vowel can reflect the target noun’s phonological environment. Dogri noun agreement and Azerbaijani suffix variation should not be collapsed into a shared masculine/feminine paradigm.
In an original Dogri list of a speaker’s book and notebook, both objects can belong to the same person even though their target possessive suffixes do not look identical. Preserve the owner across the list without forcing a single written suffix onto every Azerbaijani noun. Conversely, a phrase describing our notebook must not retain a first-person singular suffix merely because the preceding object belonged only to the speaker. The identity of each owner comes from the source dependency.
One thing can belong to several people
The Peace Corps material distinguishes possessor forms such as mənim and bizim from plurality of the possessed item. This helps with Dogri phrases in which a genitive marker agrees with a plural head: the head’s plurality counts the things, not necessarily the owners. A group’s one shared book and one person’s several books are different situations and need different target information.
For example, a Dogri instruction can ask a team to bring its shared notebook, or ask one participant to bring all of their notebooks. The first has multiple owners and a singular object; the second need not have multiple owners at all. In Azerbaijani, read the genitive possessor and the possessed noun’s suffix together before adding or interpreting plural marking. The familiar order of possessor before possessed in the two languages can disguise this difference in what the morphology expresses. Shared word order does not make their endings interchangeable. Establish owner, owned item and the number of each independently, then retain that relationship through the target suffix system.
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