Dogri to Belarusian: past agreement can follow a different participant
A feminine Dogri perfect does not always describe a female actor
Sawhney’s Dogri example of Ram eating food uses an ergative-marked Ram and a feminine perfect form alongside the feminine food noun. The same description gives a book-transfer example with feminine perfect agreement and a feminine book. These examples show why the gender of a source past form cannot automatically be assigned to the person doing the action.
Belarusian past forms, in Marchant’s explanation, inflect for gender and number in relation to the subject. A Dogri translation describing Ram’s action must therefore identify Ram before selecting the Belarusian past form. Copying the feminine value from a Dogri perfect associated with food would wrongly treat the actor as feminine. The error would concern who acted, even if the verb’s dictionary meaning remained correct.
Keep the recipient separate from the actor and object
The Dogri transfer example includes a giver, a recipient marked with gi and a book. Its feminine verbal form does not by itself choose between the recipient and the book as an agreement explanation; the cited gloss explicitly identifies the book’s feminine singular features. The translator must recover the full event rather than treat the nearest female participant as the reason for every feminine ending.
In an original scenario where a man gives a book to a woman, Belarusian should not shift the giving action to the recipient simply to align its verb with a feminine source form. If the woman later reads the book, that is a new clause with a different subject and a new agreement decision. Following the two actions separately keeps the giver, recipient and subsequent reader from being collapsed into one role.
Belarusian plural past does not repeat a singular gender choice
Marchant distinguishes masculine, feminine, neuter and plural past endings and notes that the past is not conjugated for person. A Dogri sentence can consequently require changes in how person, gender and number are expressed across the target clause. A plural Belarusian past form should not be treated as several copies of the masculine or feminine singular ending observed in an earlier sentence.
For example, a Dogri account may first describe one person eating and then a group sharing food. The target must preserve the change in actor number while keeping the food’s role as what is eaten. The source noun’s grammatical gender remains a separate fact from how many people participate. This is also why the Dogri pronoun alone may be insufficient: Sawhney’s nominative third-person forms distinguish proximity and distance without number agreement in her table. Recover participant number from the clause and discourse, then choose the Belarusian past form for the actual subject rather than for a source object or an isolated ending.
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