Dogri to Icelandic: the Icelandic verb chooses its object case
A Dogri postposition cannot assign one Icelandic case everywhere
Dogri expresses many case relations through postpositions after an oblique form. Sawhney’s description illustrates gi with a recipient in a book-transfer event. Icelandic has case-marked objects whose forms depend on the chosen verb. Rögnvaldsson contrasts seeing with an accusative object, helping with a dative object and missing somebody with a genitive object. A translator cannot treat every non-subject person in Dogri as one Icelandic object form.
In an original Dogri account about meeting, helping and missing the same visitor, the person’s identity remains constant while the target object case may change. That change does not mean that three visitors are involved or that the person has become the recipient of a transferred item. It reflects the construction selected for each Icelandic predicate.
A dative object is not always a recipient
The Icelandic example Ég hjálpa honum uses a dative form with help. A Dogri transfer’s recipient may also be interpreted through a dative relationship, but that does not make helping a transfer of an unstated object. The shared grammatical label cannot replace the meaning of the verb.
For example, a Dogri message can say that a speaker gave somebody a tool and then helped that person use it. The recipient in the giving event and the person helped refer to the same individual, but they occupy roles in different predicates. The Icelandic translation needs the case pattern appropriate to each. Do not add an object such as advice merely to justify a dative, and do not turn the person helped into the actor because the source word order differs from the target.
Near-synonyms can require different forms
Rögnvaldsson specifically contrasts hjálpa and aðstoða with dative and accusative objects respectively, despite their related helping meanings. His other examples likewise show that semantic similarity alone does not predict case. Replacing one Icelandic translation choice with a near-synonym can consequently require rebuilding the object form.
This is useful when a Dogri instruction uses a broad help expression and several Icelandic verbs appear plausible. Select a verb that fits the intended assistance, then use its construction. Do not retain the case from the first proposed verb after choosing another. The same reasoning applies to a Dogri phrase whose postposition is stable across several actions: stability in the source does not guarantee a single target ending. Recover the person and their role first, but finish the decision with the Icelandic lexical requirements. The cited paper investigates the status and historical behaviour of case; its examples support these constructional contrasts without licensing a universal prediction of future language change.
Language references