Dogri to Bulgarian: identify the actor before interpreting agreement
A feminine Dogri verb need not describe a female actor
Udita Sawhney’s Dogri morphology study illustrates Ram eating food with a feminine perfective form agreeing with the feminine food noun. Its next example describes Ram giving a feminine book noun to Rani, again with feminine perfective agreement. These examples show why the ending alone cannot identify the gender of the person performing the action.
For Dogri to Bulgarian, recover the actor, the transferred or affected item, and any recipient before considering target verb forms. In the giving example, Ram gives, the book is given, and Rani receives it. Interpreting the feminine source ending as evidence that Rani performed the giving would reverse two participants.
This is a limited observation about the illustrated Dogri constructions, not a claim that every Dogri verb agrees with an object. Sawhney also gives an intransitive example of a girl sleeping. Read the construction and its marked participants together; an isolated gender label is not a substitute for understanding the event.
Bulgarian verb person follows its subject
The Bulgarian Universal Dependencies documentation describes verbal person as agreement with the verb’s subject. Its идвам, идваш and идва illustrate first-, second- and third-person forms of coming. Those target endings therefore need to be interpreted through the Bulgarian subject relationship, rather than assigned the role of a Dogri perfective object-agreement ending.
Consider an original Dogri account in which the writer first describes a book being given by Ram, then explains that the writer is coming to collect it. The actor changes between clauses. A Bulgarian form referring to the writer in the second clause should not be selected merely because the book remains the topic across the whole message.
Conversely, mentioning the writer as a recipient does not make the writer the subject of every action. A message can say that Ram gave the writer a book without saying that the writer gave anything. Track the grammatical role that each person has in that clause, even when several first-person references appear close together.
Omitted subjects still need recoverable reference
Sawhney describes contextual subject omission in Dogri. Bulgarian is also described as a language that permits omitted subjects, with verbal person helping to identify the subject. This shared possibility does not guarantee that an isolated fragment will preserve the same person across translation.
If an original Dogri reply omits the giver because the preceding message named Ram, translating only the reply may remove the evidence needed to identify him. Include the relevant name in the source when the reply is meant to stand alone. Do not infer a different actor from the gender of the item mentioned in the fragment.
The Bulgarian third-person form идва in the documentation covers he, she or it in that present-tense example. It does not independently tell the reader which previously mentioned participant is coming. A target can therefore preserve third person grammatically while still needing a clear contextual antecedent.
Read the result as a sequence of participant roles: who acted, what was affected, and who received anything? This exposes an incorrect actor more directly than comparing source and target endings. The two languages can retain the same event while distributing agreement information differently.
Language references