Dogri to Serbian Latin: an owner’s gender and an item’s gender are separate
Dogri agreement does not necessarily identify the owner’s sex
Sawhney describes Dogri personal pronouns as distinguishing person, number and case without a grammatical gender distinction. It also describes genitive da, de and di as agreeing with the possessed head. A feminine-looking possession expression can consequently reflect the item rather than tell the reader that its owner is a woman.
Serbian possessives can encode information about the possessor as well as agree with the possessed noun. The Universal Dependencies overview explicitly separates those two layers. A Dogri translation into Serbian Latin therefore needs to establish who the owner is before selecting a target possessive stem, and which item is possessed before selecting its agreement form.
For an original Dogri message about somebody’s book, do not infer a male or female owner merely from the source book’s agreement. If the preceding conversation names the owner, that reference is relevant. If it does not, the item’s grammatical gender is not a substitute for the missing information.
A stem choice and an ending choice can vary independently
The Serbian MULTEXT-East specification lists njen and njegov among possessives and records inflected forms such as njena and njeno. These forms show why a target possession cannot be interpreted through its last vowel alone. The possessive stem and its agreement ending contribute different information.
An original contrast between her room and her belongings keeps the owner constant while changing the possessed expression. The Serbian form may change accordingly. A separate contrast between his item and her item can change owner reference while keeping the item itself constant. Those two kinds of change should not be conflated.
The Dogri source gives the translator a useful but partial guide: agreement with the possessed head already directs attention to the item. Serbian requires maintaining that attention while also preserving the owner information expressed by its possessive choice. Guessing the owner from the item would collapse the two grammatical layers that the target keeps distinct.
The same reference can have a different case form
The Serbian specification records case distinctions across possessive forms. A change in a target form can therefore arise from its phrase’s role in the sentence, without changing either the owner or the owned item. Latin spelling makes these endings visible, but visibility does not supply their interpretation.
For a Dogri message about entering somebody’s room and then speaking about that room, the source relationship can stay constant while the Serbian construction changes. The target must preserve the same room and owner even when its case-governing environment differs. Replacing each changed form with a single dictionary possessive would remove required grammatical information.
This direction calls for three separate questions inside one small phrase: whose item is it, which target noun names the item, and what role does that noun phrase have? Dogri head agreement answers part of the analysis; the Serbian stem, agreement and case complete the target expression. A recognizable Latin-script possessive is only accurate when all three relationships refer to the people and item intended by the source.
Language references