Dogri to Galician: distinguish shared ownership from one item each
Plural possessive agreement does not mean distribution
Dogri genitive marking agrees with the head noun in number, gender and case, as Sawhney describes. A plural possessed noun can therefore change the genitive form without saying how objects are divided among their owners. Galician has dedicated distributive possessive forms. The Xunta resource illustrates cadanseu and its variants with an interpretation equivalent to one for each person.
An original Dogri description of children with bicycles can concern a set of bicycles without asserting that every child has a separate one. If the source explicitly says that each child has a bicycle, a Galician distributive expression can preserve that stronger claim. Inserting it into a mere group description would add a distribution that the Dogri plural and agreeing possessive did not establish.
Cadanseu changes the assignment of objects to people
The Galician resource gives cadanseu balón for a ball assigned to each child and cadansúa bicicleta in an example involving girls and bicycles. These forms occur before the possessed element. Their practical contribution is not simply another way to express ordinary plurality. They associate individual possessed items with individual members of a group.
For a Dogri classroom instruction, distinguish bringing the team’s shared ball from bringing a ball each. The first may require only one ball in total; the second requires as many assigned balls as participants. A translation that confuses them changes the resources needed for the activity. Establish whether the source distributes the items before choosing the Galician possessive, rather than deriving an each-reading from the mere presence of multiple people.
Separate the owner count from the possessed noun’s agreement
The Xunta explanation states that ordinary Galician possessives agree with the possessed noun, not with the possessor, and that third-person singular and plural possessor forms can coincide. This resembles the need to distinguish head agreement from ownership information in Dogri, but it does not remove ambiguity automatically. A Galician plural possessive can describe several objects without by itself identifying several owners.
Imagine a Dogri inventory contrasting one child’s two notebooks, two children’s shared notebook and one notebook for each child. These are three different allocations. Ordinary possessive agreement can help express the noun phrase’s features, but the distributive meaning in the third case needs to be retained separately. If a pronoun leaves the owner unclear, the Galician resource recommends a de-plus-personal-pronoun expression for clarification in appropriate cases. That can identify whose item is meant; it still does not automatically mean each. Keep ownership, object number and distribution distinct. This prevents a fluent Galician inventory from changing a shared resource into individual property or collapsing several assigned items into one communal object.
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