Dogri to Chhattisgarhi: familiar possessives and past forms still need rebuilding
Similar ownership meanings do not require identical endings
Sawhney’s Dogri morphology paper lists merɑ among first-person singular genitive forms and describes agreement-sensitive ownership expressions. In a source phrase, a familiar possessive stem is therefore connected to the noun and its grammatical construction. It is not a general instruction to preserve the source ending in another language.
Flueckiger’s fieldwork-based account of Chhattisgarhi notes mor and tor for the ownership meanings associated with mine and yours. These differ from the longer forms a reader may expect through familiarity with neighbouring languages. They should not be treated as incomplete words simply because a Dogri possessive has another shape.
For a Dogri message contrasting my belongings with your belongings, retain the two owners. Replacing the grammatical packaging does not erase that contrast. At the same time, recognizing a similar ownership meaning does not justify leaving the entire Dogri noun phrase unchanged in the target.
A plural suffix and an oblique form perform different jobs
Flueckiger illustrates Chhattisgarhi plural -man with a word for boys and discusses a following ke construction. Her description notes that the noun does not undergo the Hindi-style oblique change before a postposition in the pattern discussed. That is a documented observation about the language she describes, not evidence that all Indo-Aryan languages handle such phrases alike.
Sawhney separately describes Dogri noun inflection and postpositions. Its source phrase can therefore contain number information and case-related material that should not be transferred as a single indivisible ending. A change required by a Dogri postposition is not automatically part of the lexical identity of the person or thing.
When translating a phrase about something belonging to several boys, distinguish the boys’ plurality from the possession relationship. The target needs to identify both. Copying a Dogri oblique noun shape into Chhattisgarhi may preserve a source grammatical feature at the expense of the target construction; deleting all ending-like material could instead remove the group’s number.
Read each part for its contribution before choosing the target phrase. A noun’s dictionary stem, its number marking and the following relationship expression are connected, but they are not interchangeable pieces of information.
Do not require every Dogri feminine past form to remain visibly feminine
Sawhney’s Dogri examples include a feminine perfective verb with feminine food in a sentence about Ram eating. The actor and the agreement target must be interpreted through the complete construction. Inferring a female actor from that ending would already misread the source.
In her account of Chhattisgarhi usage, Flueckiger reports limited use of feminine verbal forms and the absence of the Hindi-style transitive past ne pattern. These observations come from her described linguistic and fieldwork setting; they should not be expanded into a claim that every speaker or contemporary variety has identical paradigms.
For a Dogri narrative, preserve who acted and what was affected even if the Chhattisgarhi output does not reproduce the same feminine ending. Visible agreement is not a substitute for correct participant reference. The useful comparison is between whole constructions: an ownership expression, a plural phrase with a postposition, or a past event. Similar vocabulary can make this pair look easy while concealing differences in each of those grammatical relationships.
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