Dogri to Pashto: object agreement is a useful clue, not a complete translation rule
A shared agreement pattern can conceal different requirements
Dogri and Pashto both provide examples in which a transitive past construction directs attention to the object rather than treating every verb ending as a description of the actor. That is a useful starting point for this direction, especially when a sentence mentions two people. It does not mean that their actor marking, pronouns and word order can be transferred unchanged.
Sawhney gives Dogri Rɑm=ne ruʈi kʰɑ-d̪i, with Ram as the marked agent and a feminine form on the verb corresponding to the food noun. Reading that ending as proof that the eater is female would misidentify the participant. Her separate intransitive example kuɽi su-t̪i hi describes a girl sleeping. The two examples require different agreement interpretations because their constructions differ.
Past transitive Pashto also requires the actor to be identified separately
Tegey and Robson’s Beginning Pashto states that past transitive verbs agree with their object in person and number and place the subject in the oblique case. Its teaching examples distinguish a person taking someone home from that person being taken. Consequently, translating a Dogri report of a completed action requires two independent decisions: identify the actor from the source construction and identify the object that controls the Pashto agreement.
The Dogri agent marker ne cannot simply become a spare word added to a Pashto clause. The Pashto construction has its own oblique subject requirement. Keeping the actor’s identity while rebuilding its grammatical expression is essential when the Dogri source uses a full name but the target uses a pronoun. A superficially familiar past agreement pattern does not settle the pronoun’s form.
An absent object pronoun need not mean an absent object
The Pashto textbook explains that weak object pronouns are dropped in the past transitive constructions it teaches because the verb ending supplies the relevant information. Weak subject pronouns, by contrast, remain expressed in those constructions. Their placement follows the weak-pronoun pattern after the first stressed element.
This creates a specific trap for a Dogri reader checking the result: a visibly short Pashto sentence may still encode the person affected through its verb. Reintroducing a full object solely because a source pronoun was visible can alter the expression’s focus. Conversely, removing the Pashto actor pronoun on the assumption that the verb already names the actor can lose the distinction the construction needs.
Sawhney notes contextual subject-pronoun omission in Dogri. That source option therefore cannot be applied indiscriminately to the target. First determine whether a missing Dogri pronoun is recoverable as agent or object, then determine how the Pashto past construction represents that participant. The two omissions have different grammatical explanations.
An ongoing past event does not remove the agreement issue
Tegey and Robson extend the same subject-versus-object agreement distinction to the past imperfective constructions they introduce. Therefore changing the source event from a completed occurrence to an ongoing past activity does not justify treating every target ending as subject agreement. The event’s temporal presentation and the identity of its participants remain separate questions.
These observations are scoped to the Afghan Pashto patterns taught in that course. For this pair, the strongest safeguard is a participant map grounded in the Dogri case marking and the target construction, rather than a mechanical equivalence between two languages that both display object-oriented past agreement.
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