Dogri to Marathi: familiar agreement still needs a new noun analysis
Shared script does not establish shared gender
Dogri and Marathi can both appear in Devanagari, but a recognizable script does not make their noun systems interchangeable. Sawhney describes masculine and feminine agreement in Dogri. The Marathi Universal Dependencies overview distinguishes masculine, feminine and neuter. A Dogri noun’s agreement class consequently cannot supply a complete answer for its Marathi translation.
Consider a Dogri instruction involving somebody’s document. The target noun used for document determines the Marathi agreement required around it. Preserving the source possessor and the intended document does not mean copying the final vowel of the Dogri possessive. That would treat source gender as if it were an invariant property of the object in every language.
This is especially easy to overlook where a name and a familiar-looking possession marker appear together. The name identifies the owner, but the possessed item controls another part of the construction. A target ending can change correctly when the item changes even though the same person remains its owner.
The possessed item controls the genitive form
The Dogri analysis describes da, de and di as agreeing with the possessed head. Marathi likewise has an agreeing possessive element: the UD account lists चा, ची, चे and च्या and explains its agreement with the possessed entity rather than the owner. The broad resemblance is useful, but it does not make the individual forms equivalent letter by letter.
An original Dogri message listing one person’s room and that person’s belongings therefore needs each Marathi noun phrase evaluated separately. A repeated owner need not produce an identical possessive ending. Conversely, an ending difference alone does not establish that the owner changed from a man to a woman.
The Marathi description treats this possessive material as a separate syntactic unit even when it is attached in writing. A Dogri reader expecting visibly separate postpositions should not infer that a missing space removes the ownership relation. What matters is which item the possessive element agrees with and which expression identifies its owner.
Past agreement can point toward the transferred item
Sawhney illustrates a Dogri past transfer in which Ram bears ne, Rani bears gi and the verb agrees with the feminine book. The Marathi overview also describes split ergativity, including past transitive constructions with an ergative actor and object-related verbal agreement. This is a reason to trace participants carefully, not to equate all past constructions in the two languages.
In a Dogri account of giving the document, distinguish the person who gave it, the person who received it and the thing given before reading Marathi endings. A feminine-looking target verb need not identify a female giver. Its grammatical form may reflect the transferred item in the relevant construction.
The same document can consequently govern agreement inside its possessive phrase and participate in agreement with a past verb, while its owner, giver and recipient remain different people. For this direction, the helpful shared pattern is attention to grammatical relationships. The misleading shortcut is to use a familiar Devanagari ending as a fixed signal of somebody’s sex or role without identifying the Marathi noun that actually controls it.
Language references