Dogri to Fijian: distinguish respect from number and ownership from use
A respectful Dogri address is not merely a head count
Sawhney’s Dogri morphology study identifies tuss as a respectful singular address as well as a plural form, contrasting it with the familiar tu. Joseph Hong’s Fijian study likewise shows that apparently nonsingular pronouns can address one person respectfully. However, that resemblance does not provide a fixed tuss-to-Fijian substitution. Hong describes different uses associated with social relationships, including kinship and status. The Dogri expression establishes respectful intent; the appropriate Fijian form also depends on the target interaction.
For ordinary counting, Fijian distinguishes one person, two people, a smaller group and a larger group in its pronouns. Hong cautions that the category traditionally called trial is not restricted to exactly three. His objective forms include kemudrau for two and kemudou for a few. If a Dogri message addresses a plural group, its size may therefore affect the translation. If it addresses one respected person, numerical interpretation alone can lead to the wrong choice.
Dogri possessive agreement does not classify food and drink
Dogri’s genitive da agrees with the gender, number and case of its head, according to Sawhney. In Fijian, a possessive classifier can instead identify the relationship between a person and something possessed. Wang’s linguistic analysis contrasts ika kei Jone, fish intended for Jone to eat, with ika nei Jone, fish associated with his ownership. The difference is not the masculine or feminine classification of the fish. It changes how Jone relates to it.
This distinction becomes practical in a Dogri account of food preparation. A person who caught or bought a fish is not necessarily the person intended to eat it. Wang specifically contrasts acquisition with the eating relationship and gives different intended eaters in a minimal pair. Recover that relationship from the Dogri passage before selecting a Fijian possessive. A possessive expression that correctly identifies the purchaser can still misrepresent who is meant to receive the meal.
Read the Dogri phrase before deciding what to expand
Dogri places postpositions after their complements. Its genitive can be visibly inflected, while most other postpositions in Sawhney’s description are invariant. These source distinctions are useful clues, but their individual pieces are not a ready-made inventory of Fijian suffixes.
Sawhney also distinguishes proximate and distal third-person nominative forms and notes that those forms do not themselves exhibit number agreement. A short source reference can therefore require information from the preceding noun phrase. Fijian’s more detailed pronoun number system makes that information consequential. For a Dogri account introducing two visitors and subsequently referring to them with a short pronoun, retain the established pair rather than selecting a larger-group form by default. The missing source ending is not evidence that the pair has become an unspecified crowd.
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