Dogri to Bodo: possession endings do not identify the owner’s gender
First identify what the possessive expression modifies
Sawhney’s Dogri study describes the genitive postposition as agreeing with the head noun in number, gender and case. Its discussion also presents genitive pronoun forms with masculine and feminine alternatives. A changed possessive form can therefore reflect the thing described rather than a change in the person it belongs to.
For Dogri to Bodo, establish the owner independently of the possessed item. An original description can mention a woman’s house and then her belongings. If the Dogri forms change with those nouns, the owner can remain the same woman throughout. Do not create a second owner merely to explain a different-looking source ending.
Conversely, two people can own similar objects whose Dogri noun phrases have matching agreement. That formal resemblance does not make the two owners identical. Keep the names or established pronoun antecedents in view rather than allowing a possessive ending to merge participants.
Bodo marks possession on the personal reference
Parijat Narzary’s Bodo study describes a genitive marker ni following personal pronouns. Its table includes bini for his or her and bisərni for their. These transcribed forms are linguistic reading aids; they are not replacements for the selected Bodo writing system.
The same study states that Bodo personal pronouns do not distinguish gender. A single target possessive form can consequently cover reference to either a male or female individual in the illustrated paradigm. Its unchanged shape does not establish that a Dogri reference to a woman has been lost.
Imagine an original Dogri lost-property exchange: one sentence identifies a woman’s bag, and another identifies a man’s bag. Bodo may not reproduce a gender difference inside the possessive pronoun itself. The people must still be distinguished through names, antecedents or the relevant descriptions. Do not change the identity of the owner simply to force every source contrast into one target word.
An owner, an object and a recipient are three different roles
Narzary’s table separates subject, direct-object, indirect-object and possessive pronoun forms. Its third-person entries distinguish bikhəu, binə and bini in those respective object, recipient and possession columns. The resemblance of the forms is a reason to read their function carefully, not to treat them as interchangeable variants.
For an original Dogri instruction to return somebody’s book to a colleague, the owner need not be the colleague receiving it. The colleague may be collecting it on the owner’s behalf. A translation that makes every personal reference possessive could change the ownership; one that makes every reference a recipient could lose the description of whose book is involved.
Start with the object being returned, then identify who it belongs to and who receives it. If the same person occupies both roles, preserve that identity; if different people occupy them, preserve the distinction. The target construction must express those relationships even when its pronoun forms look closely related.
This pair therefore needs more than matching a Dogri possessive ending with a Bodo suffix. Dogri head agreement, Bodo personal reference and the event’s participant roles supply different information. Read each at its own level so that a change in grammar does not become an unintended change in ownership.
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