Dogri to Haitian Creole: distinguish respect, group size and the reference of nou
A respectful Dogri you need not refer to several people
Sawhney’s Dogri description lists t̪uss both as a plural second-person form and as a respectful way to address a singular person. The form alone therefore does not always determine whether one listener or a group is involved. The surrounding exchange must establish the audience.
The APiCS Haitian Creole survey lists ou for singular second person and nou for both first-person plural and second-person plural. Translating a respectful singular Dogri address as a plural nou merely because the source uses t̪uss can change the number of people addressed.
For a Dogri message to an older relative, identify that the addressee is one person before choosing the Haitian pronoun. For a message to several relatives, preserve the group. Respectful source morphology and actual participant count are different facts; the target should not turn one into the other automatically.
Haitian nou does not by itself distinguish we from you plural
Dogri’s cited paradigm distinguishes first-person plural əss from second-person plural t̪uss. Haitian nou can cover both relationships. The APiCS survey explicitly notes that surrounding language and situation usually resolve the resulting ambiguity. A single Haitian form can therefore correspond to two source references that Dogri keeps visibly separate.
This matters when a Dogri message contrasts the writer’s group with the recipients: we will bring something, while you will prepare something else. Repeating a target pronoun does not prove that both actions belong to the same group, but an isolated sentence may make that difference hard to recover.
Keep the two responsibilities distinct through the full wording of the exchange. If the source names the writer’s family and the recipient’s family, those descriptions can help establish the groups. Do not discard their identifying role merely because a pronoun has already appeared. Conversely, do not invent an extra group simply to avoid the shared spelling nou.
The translation question is who includes the speaker and who includes the listener in each clause. That is more informative than assigning one permanent English gloss to a Haitian word that serves both functions.
Object and ownership forms are also organized differently
Sawhney separates Dogri nominative, oblique and genitive pronoun paradigms, with singular first-person forms including miɡi and merɑ outside the nominative set. Their distinctions help identify the source relationship: acting, receiving or owning are not interchangeable participant roles.
The Haitian survey states that dependent personal pronouns do not distinguish subject from object forms, and that adnominal possessives use the same forms placed after the noun. A difference that Dogri marks through pronoun shape may therefore be expressed through the Haitian construction and position.
For a Dogri sentence mentioning the writer’s belongings and something given to the writer, do not assume that similar-looking Haitian pronouns collapse ownership and receipt into one meaning. Look at how the noun and predicate organize the relationships. At the same time, a correctly chosen pronoun cannot compensate for attaching a possession to the wrong person.
These contrasts explain why a concise Haitian translation may repeat a form where the Dogri original varies its pronouns. Accuracy depends on preserving the participant relationships, including actual audience size, rather than maintaining a one-to-one inventory of visibly different source words.
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