Dogri to Croatian: a speaker’s own room can require svoj rather than moj
First person does not guarantee a Croatian first-person possessive
Sawhney’s Dogri morphology paper lists first-person ownership forms such as merɑ and sɑɽɑ. These distinguish the speaker’s possession from a speaker-containing group’s possession. Their person information matters, but a Croatian translation must also ask whether that owner is the subject of the current clause.
The Croatian Institute’s school grammar teaches svoj for possession associated with the subject regardless of grammatical person. Its examples Ja imam svoju sobu and Ti imaš svoju sobu use the same reflexive possessive pattern with different subjects. A Dogri expression meaning my therefore should not automatically produce moj in every Croatian sentence.
For a message in which the writer describes having or using the writer’s room, establish that the actor and owner are the same person. If the writer instead says that the recipient uses the writer’s room, those roles are different. Keeping the ownership person while ignoring the subject relationship can produce an inappropriate Croatian possessive choice.
The person mentioned nearest the possessive is not necessarily its owner
The school grammar contrasts a sentence about Lucija reading her own book with one about Lucija reading a book belonging to another female person. It distinguishes svoju from njezinu in that context. This choice can change ownership even while the same person continues to do the reading.
Dogri’s genitive paradigm and its gender-sensitive noun phrases must be read as part of their complete source construction. A feminine agreement shape near a word for book is not, by itself, evidence identifying a female owner; grammatical agreement and the intended ownership relationship must not be conflated.
Consider a Dogri exchange introducing two relatives and then describing one relative reading a book associated with the other. The Croatian translation needs to retain both the reader and the owner. Referring to the reader reflexively just because that person is the clause’s subject would incorrectly move the book into that person’s possession.
Conversely, when the source clearly describes the reader’s own book, a non-reflexive third-person possessive may introduce an unintended other owner in the standard contrast taught. Decide the ownership relationship from the source before using the target grammar to express it.
Svoj changes with its noun phrase, not with every new owner
The Croatian school grammar provides case, gender and number forms of svoj. Its accusative distinguishes masculine animate from masculine inanimate patterns as well as feminine and neuter forms. The reflexive relationship does not make the possessive an invariant word that can be inserted unchanged before any noun.
Dogri already requires attention to case and agreement, so this is not simply a contrast between a language with endings and one without them. The issue is which relationship each ending expresses. Source ownership person, target reflexivity and the grammatical features of the possessed noun phrase are separate decisions.
A Dogri paragraph can move from the writer’s book to the writer’s relatives while the owner remains the same. Croatian may change the possessive form because the possessed phrase changes. Do not interpret that visible variation as a change of owner, and do not hold one form fixed merely to signal continuity. A useful translation retains who owns what while allowing the target possessive construction to respond to its noun and clause.
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