Dogri to Hebrew: respectful address and grammatical gender are separate choices
A respectful Dogri form does not identify a plural Hebrew audience
Sawhney’s Dogri morphology paper lists t̪uss as both a respectful singular second-person form and a plural form. A source sentence can therefore address one older person without announcing that several listeners are present. The number of actual addressees needs to be established from the exchange.
The Hebrew educational publisher CET presents separate singular and plural second-person pronouns and distinguishes gender within those sets. Its paradigm includes אתה and את in the singular and אתם and אתן in the plural. Choosing the target pronoun involves information that cannot be read from a respectful Dogri t̪uss alone.
For a Dogri note to one relative, identify that individual before selecting a Hebrew audience form. For a note to a group, preserve the group. Do not use a target plural merely as a visual substitute for the source’s respectful form, and do not treat source politeness as if it specified which Hebrew gender form to select.
Proximity in the source is not the same distinction as Hebrew gender
The Dogri paper’s third-person nominative paradigm distinguishes proximate e from distal o. Its discussion separates this system from gender-marked noun and adjective forms. The source pronoun can point toward an available referent without containing the same gender opposition found in the Hebrew third-person paradigm.
CET’s table distinguishes הוא from היא in the singular and gives corresponding plural forms. A translation must recover the intended person or thing before using those forms. A nearby versus a distant reference is not converted into masculine versus feminine simply by selecting different Hebrew pronouns.
This matters when a Dogri message discusses two people and uses short references rather than repeating their names. Preserve which person each reference identifies. If the intended distinction depends on distance or contrast, replacing it with two gendered Hebrew words may not retain that information, particularly when both referents require the same target gender.
Conversely, a Hebrew form can make a grammatical distinction that the isolated Dogri nominative leaves implicit. That additional choice should come from the source referent and its translated expression, not from an assumption that the first person mentioned must take one gender and the second another.
A noun’s plural ending does not reliably establish Hebrew gender
The Hebrew Academy’s overview explains that plural noun endings do not always align with the gender division found in adjective agreement. Some masculine nouns take -ot, and some feminine nouns take -im. Adjectives agree with the noun’s grammatical gender and number rather than with a guess based solely on its last letters.
Sawhney likewise warns through examples that Dogri noun gender is not perfectly predicted by final vowels: rain and water illustrate exceptions to a simple shape-based expectation. Neither source nor target should therefore be processed through one universal rule equating a final vowel with gender.
For a Dogri description containing a noun and a quality, select the correct Hebrew noun and then form its agreement relationship. The grammatical gender of the Dogri noun does not automatically establish the Hebrew noun’s classification. Across address, third-person reference and description, the central task is to preserve the intended participants while expressing the distinctions required by the Hebrew construction.
Language references