Dogri to French: respectful address and possessives need separate agreement decisions
Tuss can identify one respected recipient
Sawhney’s Dogri morphology account distinguishes familiar tu from respectful singular tuss, while also recording tuss for plural reference. French tu and vous offer a comparable distinction between familiarity and respectful address, but the social choice still needs interpretation. The OQLF explains that French practices vary across relationships and regions, with spontaneous tu more frequent in some francophone settings than others. A Dogri respectful request should preserve its interpersonal meaning rather than automatically acquire a casual French tone because only one person is addressed.
Conversely, a Dogri plural group needs a genuinely plural interpretation even if the same source form could address one elder. Identify the intended audience before translating a request, invitation or direct description. The source spelling alone does not settle that question. Nor should familiar wording from a senior person to a younger recipient automatically make the younger person’s reply equally familiar: the OQLF explicitly recognises interactions in which the two speakers use different address forms.
Respectful vous does not make every agreement plural
A French translation addressed to one woman can use vous with a feminine singular adjective or participle. OQLF’s example Vous voici rassurée, Madame illustrates that combination. The respectful pronoun has the same form as plural you, but rassurée describes one female recipient. Adding a plural ending merely because the Dogri source uses respectful tuss would confuse social address with the actual number of people.
The distinction also appears in vous-même for one person, contrasting with vous-mêmes for several. For a Dogri instruction that asks the recipient to perform something personally, that final spelling difference depends on the intended referent. It cannot be resolved by looking up tuss once. Keep the Dogri honorific interpretation separate from the target’s singular or plural descriptive agreement, especially when the message switches between one representative and an entire group.
A French possessive can look masculine before a feminine noun
Dogri’s genitive da changes with the gender, number and case of the head noun. French possessive determiners also respond to the possessed noun, but the individual forms do not match the Dogri paradigm. French ma, ta and sa have plural counterparts mes, tes and ses, and these plural forms do not distinguish masculine from feminine. Translate the possessed expression first rather than copying the source marker’s visible gender into French.
There is a further spelling and pronunciation condition: French normally uses mon, ton and son before a feminine word beginning with a vowel or mute h. Thus mon amie can identify a female friend; mon does not turn the friend into a man. When a Dogri source explicitly identifies a woman, an apparently masculine possessive in this French construction is not necessarily a contradiction. Likewise, the form of son does not independently reveal the owner’s sex. Recover the owner from the source relationships, and read the French determiner together with its following expression.
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