Dogri to Serbian Cyrillic: past-tense gender can point to a different participant
The Dogri verb may agree with the thing given
Sawhney’s Dogri description includes a past transfer in which Ram bears ne, Rani bears gi and the verb has feminine agreement associated with the book. Ram is still the giver. A feminine verbal ending in this construction does not mean that the person performing the action is female.
Serbian uses gender agreement in participles, while its finite verb forms do not themselves inflect for gender, as the UD overview explains. A Serbian compound past needs its own subject-related participial agreement. Carrying a Dogri object-related gender directly into that target participle can attach the wrong gender to the actor.
For an original Dogri report meaning a man gave a book to a woman, identify the giver independently of the book and the recipient. The Serbian target must keep those roles even though its past construction does not follow the same agreement trail as the Dogri example. The recipient’s identity cannot substitute for the actor’s when interpreting the participle.
An intransitive source offers a useful comparison
The Dogri article also illustrates a girl sleeping with feminine agreement. That intransitive example and the transitive book-transfer example can both display feminine verbal material, but for different participant relationships. The common ending alone does not tell the translator which person should control the Serbian past form.
Compare an original report that a woman slept with one that a man transferred a feminine-named object. In the first, the source agreement concerns the woman who sleeps; in the second, the cited Dogri pattern concerns the object transferred. The Serbian translation needs the subject of each target clause, rather than one rule saying that every source feminine ending identifies a female actor.
This comparison matters in short messages without an explicit subject pronoun in every sentence. A source object’s gender cannot safely fill in an omitted actor. Recover the actor through the surrounding Dogri clause and discourse; otherwise a plausible Serbian participle can create a person-reference claim that the source did not support.
Cyrillic spelling does not change the agreement analysis
The Cyrillic option supplies a Serbian writing system, not a different set of participant roles. A target written in the requested script still needs the distinction between the person, the finite auxiliary and the gender-marked participle. Script correctness cannot demonstrate that a masculine giver or feminine sleeper has been identified correctly.
The Serbian overview also distinguishes three noun genders, including neuter, while Sawhney’s Dogri account describes two. An object’s Serbian grammatical gender therefore cannot be recovered just by retaining the Dogri noun’s class. This is another reason not to transfer a visible source ending into every target agreement position.
For this direction, trace the source construction before interpreting the target ending: is the Dogri predicate transitive or intransitive, which phrase is the actor, and what controls the cited agreement? Then read the Serbian subject and participle together. That method preserves the event’s participants while allowing the target to express its past tense through its own grammar and the selected Cyrillic script.
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