Dogri to Kannada: follow the experiencer and read the whole written syllable
A dative-marked person need not be a recipient
Dogri uses postpositions and oblique forms to express relationships between participants. Kannada often attaches grammatical material to the noun or pronoun, but identifying a dative ending does not automatically identify someone receiving an object. Amritavalli’s research gives makkaLige jvara bantu for children becoming ill, literally presenting fever as coming to the children. The children experience the condition; they are not recipients of an ordinary delivery.
The verb in that example agrees with the singular fever expression rather than the plural children. This is relevant when translating a Dogri statement whose main concern is several people’s condition. A singular-looking Kannada verb can preserve that meaning. Determine which target expression controls agreement instead of changing the verb merely because the Dogri passage concerns more than one person. The paper discusses competing analyses of these constructions, so its examples do not justify declaring that every dative phrase is the sentence’s subject.
Dogri endings contain several kinds of information
Sawhney’s Dogri description distinguishes masculine and feminine noun agreement, and shows that only certain adjective classes decline for gender, number and case. Its examples contrast forms of the adjective meaning good with a boy, boys, a girl and girls. That source ending is consequently not just an extra sound to retain when the message is rewritten in Kannada. It can help identify the expression being described and its number.
Dogri’s genitive da likewise agrees with its head, while most other postpositions in that account are invariant. Before translating a compact Dogri phrase, distinguish an owner from the thing owned and from someone located nearby. Those roles cannot be reconstructed from the repeated presence of one familiar-looking ending. The Kannada fever example already shows why grammatical marking and everyday participant roles need separate interpretation. A person associated with a state, an owner and a recipient may require different target constructions even when a word-for-word approach would group them together.
Familiar Indic principles come with different Kannada shapes
A Dogri reader familiar with Devanagari already encounters consonants with inherent vowels and signs that modify them. Unicode explicitly relates the Kannada system to those principles: its virama suppresses an inherent vowel and can help form a consonant cluster. Yet the target characters and their displayed combinations are different. Kannada ್ is its own virama sign, not a Devanagari character that can be substituted because the function sounds familiar.
Kannada conjunct components commonly appear below or to the lower right of the first consonant. Several encoded characters can therefore produce one compact written group. Unicode also distinguishes complete vowel letters such as ಊ from visually assembled substitutes that should not be used to encode them. For a translated name or technical term, copying only the largest visible character can omit a consonant or vowel component. Preserve the Kannada character sequence as written; similarity to a Dogri reading habit is helpful for recognising the principle, but cannot determine the correct target spelling.
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