Dogri to Maithili: respect can affect the verb as well as the pronoun
A respectful source pronoun is only the start of the target choice
Sawhney’s Dogri description contrasts informal t̪u with respectful singular t̪uss, also used for a plural audience. The writer’s relationship to the listener matters, but that particular source contrast does not establish a complete one-to-one mapping onto every Maithili address category.
Kumari and Chandra’s Maithili study distinguishes several second-person honorific levels and shows their effects on verbal agreement. Its sleeping examples contrast endings associated with non-honorific and mid-honorific addressees even where the written pronoun is the same tõ. The distinction cannot be located by inspecting the pronoun alone.
For a Dogri message addressed to a family member or teacher, first identify the addressee and the intended social relationship. Then interpret the complete Maithili predicate. Choosing an apparently respectful pronoun while retaining a verb form associated with another level may leave the sentence inconsistent with the intended address.
Changing you saw me into I saw you can affect multiple agreement
The Maithili paper reports object agreement for second-person objects and honorific third-person objects in the constructions studied. First-person objects do not trigger that same additional agreement. Its paired examples of seeing show that reversing speaker and listener can change the verbal morphology, not just exchange two pronouns.
Dogri has distinct nominative and oblique personal-pronoun forms in Sawhney’s paradigm. Those forms help a reader identify who sees and who is seen. Preserving those roles in Maithili still requires the target construction to account for whichever participants control its agreement.
A reply describing I saw you is therefore not safely produced by exchanging the first and second participants in a previously translated you saw me sentence. The event has reversed direction, and the Maithili agreement pattern may now reflect the listener as object. This is a concrete reason to reconsider the whole predicate after a seemingly small pronoun edit.
The same distinction is relevant to a Dogri account in which the speaker first describes being noticed and then describes noticing someone else. A familiar perception verb does not make those clauses grammatically equivalent. Keep the observer and observed person separate before choosing the target form.
Object-related agreement is not a single transferable category
Sawhney’s Dogri example about Ram eating food marks the food feminine and gives feminine perfective agreement. The source actor is still Ram. In that example, the visible agreement cannot be interpreted simply as the actor’s gender.
The Maithili study’s object-agreement discussion instead concerns person and honorific distinctions for the eligible objects. A source form described as agreeing with an object therefore does not tell the translator that the target must copy its gender label or use an identically shaped ending. The two accounts identify different grammatical features and conditions.
When translating a Dogri sentence about a respected person, do not treat that person as though they were merely another noun in an object-agreement template learned from the food example. Establish their role and the intended reference level. When translating a sentence about an inanimate item, do not invent a human honorific relationship to justify an agreement form.
The useful link between these languages is attention to complete participant structure. Agreement can involve more than the immediately visible subject, but each target construction has its own requirements. These observations concern the Maithili patterns investigated in the cited study, rather than every dialect or every possible sentence.
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