Dogri to Nepali: similar-looking endings still need a fresh grammatical reading
Possessive agreement follows the thing possessed
Dogri’s genitive da agrees with the gender, number and case of its head noun. Nepali likewise has possessive agreement, but its forms must be selected from the Nepali expression. The university course Introduction to the Nepali Language contrasts तपाईंको किताब, your book, with तपाईंकी आमा, your mother. The changed ending does not identify a different owner; the thing or person described by the possessed noun has changed.
The course also gives मेरो, my, instead of forming that possessive by adding ko directly to म, I. A Dogri reader familiar with a special first-person genitive can recognise the general need for a separate form without treating the two languages’ paradigms as identical. When an owner remains constant while several possessions are listed, adjust the Nepali phrase according to each head. Repeating one unchanged possessive from the first line can lose the agreement required by a later expression.
A plural-looking Nepali form may have another function
Prasain’s Nepali morphology dissertation distinguishes केटो, a boy, from केटा, boys, but also records केटा as an oblique form and a vocative. The same surface spelling can therefore participate in different grammatical analyses. A Dogri source with a singular person in an oblique relationship should not be interpreted as plural merely because the Nepali translation resembles a plural noun.
This is especially relevant when the source addresses someone directly rather than describes a group. Prasain illustrates the changed noun in a vocative instruction to one boy. Elsewhere, a following case marker helps establish a noun’s grammatical role. Read the Nepali noun with its construction and the source referent. A final vowel is insufficient to establish head count, and a familiar Indic spelling does not make the languages’ case and address conventions interchangeable.
Recover the Dogri agreement chain before selecting target forms
Sawhney’s Dogri examples contrast forms of good with a boy, boys, a girl and girls. Prasain’s Nepali noun paradigm shows why similar source agreement must be read with its complete phrase: the target form केटा can serve more than one grammatical analysis. A Dogri singular oblique expression should not become a Nepali plural merely because its translated noun resembles the target plural form. Case and number must be resolved together.
Its pronoun description adds another caution. Proximate e and distal o in the third-person nominative paradigm do not themselves exhibit number agreement with their head nouns. In a Dogri passage introducing two relatives and later discussing one relative’s belongings, use the earlier noun phrases to recover which reference is singular and which is plural. That source analysis helps resolve the ambiguous Nepali surface forms described above. Preserve the participant and possession relationships through the translation, rather than inferring them afresh from each isolated ending.
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