Dogri to Catalan: possessives can follow a place expression or casa
A Dogri possessive phrase need not retain its word order
Sawhney illustrates Dogri ownership with mer-ɑ kɑ:r, my house, putting the possessor before the possessed noun. The same morphology paper describes genitive forms and their agreement relationships. These clues establish ownership in the source, but do not require a Catalan possessive to occupy the identical position.
The Catalan language consortium CPNL teaches casa meva for the house where the speaker lives, without an article and with the possessive after casa. It also gives casa teva and casa nostra. A Dogri phrase whose ownership appears first can therefore correspond to a conventional Catalan expression with the ownership word later.
For an invitation or a message about going home, decide whether the source means someone’s residence in that ordinary personal sense. Mechanically moving a translated my to the front can overlook the target expression. Equally, a discussion of property ownership may need a different interpretation from a casual invitation to the place where somebody lives.
Spatial expressions have their own possessive arrangements
Dogri uses postpositions after an oblique expression to establish relationships such as above or with in Sawhney’s description. Catalan does not preserve those relationships by copying each source word into the same order. Its spatial constructions must be assembled according to their own patterns.
CPNL gives davant meu and al meu davant as alternatives for in front of me. With the definite article in the relevant spatial expression, the possessive can appear before or after; without that article, the guidance places it after the expression. A difference in position does not necessarily introduce a different person or location.
This is useful when a Dogri message tells a reader where to stand relative to the speaker or where an object lies relative to another person. Identify the reference person and the spatial relationship separately. Then choose the Catalan construction that expresses those two meanings together, rather than assuming that an unfamiliar ordering has reversed who is in front of whom.
The oblique marking in a Dogri phrase can help explain how it functions in its source sentence. It is not an instruction to invent an equivalent case suffix on each Catalan word. The target phrase may distribute the same relationship across an article, a preposition and a possessive.
The gender of seva does not identify a female owner
CPNL’s paradigm gives el seu, la seva, els seus and les seves for both singular and plural third-person owners. The form varies with the possessed expression, while the same set can serve more than one owner configuration. A feminine-looking form is not sufficient evidence that the source owner is a woman.
Dogri likewise has agreement-sensitive genitive expressions in the cited description. A translation therefore requires two separate decisions: who owns or is associated with the thing, and what grammatical form the Catalan noun phrase takes. Matching source and target endings visually cannot settle either decision.
When a Dogri paragraph mentions two relatives and then refers to a home, retain the intended resident or owner through the surrounding reference. The Catalan possessive may remain compatible with several participants. Correct placement in casa or a spatial expression is valuable, but it must be combined with the right ownership relationship rather than treated as a substitute for interpreting the source.
Language references