Dogri to Bashkir: an unchanged adjective can be correct
Dogri agreement need not become Bashkir adjective endings
Sawhney identifies a class of Dogri adjectives whose forms change with the noun’s gender, number and case. Poppe’s Bashkir Manual describes attributive adjectives as invariable when they modify a head noun. Translating an inflected Dogri adjective into an unchanged Bashkir modifier is therefore not necessarily a loss of meaning. The target construction expresses the property without reproducing the source’s agreement pattern.
The Dogri description contrasts forms of good accompanying a boy, boys, a girl and girls. The property remains goodness while agreement tracks the noun. In a Bashkir rendering, the unchanged attributive modifier can still describe the appropriate people, with number and other required information carried by the noun phrase. Adding an invented adjective plural merely to imitate a Dogri ending would confuse grammatical agreement with a separate lexical meaning.
A description of action is not automatically a new adjective
Sawhney also documents Dogri adverbial forms meaning slowly that vary with the participant addressed. The adjective-like change of form does not make the instruction describe a different object: it still tells somebody how to walk. Poppe notes that Bashkir adjectives can function adverbially as attributes of verbs. A translation must preserve the manner relation rather than assume that every visibly agreeing Dogri form modifies a noun.
Compare the original English scenarios of a slow walker and an instruction to walk slowly. The first describes a person; the second modifies an action. Dogri agreement can occur within expressions of the second kind, so its presence alone cannot decide between those readings. The Bashkir wording needs to retain what the source says about the walking, without turning a temporary instruction about pace into a permanent description of the person.
Substantivized adjectives are a different construction
The Bashkir manual qualifies its invariability rule: adjectives functioning as substantives can take plural, possessive and case suffixes. Consequently, a translator should not remove all endings from every Bashkir word with an adjectival meaning. The distinction is between a modifier attached to an expressed head and a form used substantivally, not simply between words meaning properties and words meaning objects.
An original Dogri selection instruction might distinguish the good books from the bad ones. If the target repeats the noun, its adjectives occur as modifiers; if a target construction uses a property word substantivally, different morphology may be appropriate. The source’s information must survive in either case: which items are selected, which property distinguishes them and how many are involved. A suffix on a substantivized form is not a contradiction of attributive invariability. Identify the target word’s role in its phrase before comparing it with the Dogri adjective. This gives a more reliable translation than either copying every source ending or stripping every target property word down to a dictionary form.
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