Dogri to Swahili: agreement can identify a noun class without identifying sex
The good child need not become a boy
Sawhney describes masculine and feminine agreement in Dogri, including different forms of a word meaning good with boys and girls. The University of Georgia Swahili course instead illustrates mtoto mzuri, a good child, and watoto wazuri, good children. The target prefixes express their noun-class and number pattern; they do not identify the child as male.
For an original Dogri sentence about a good girl, preserve that she is a girl if the source actually specifies it. But do not infer that the Swahili adjective prefix must itself reproduce the Dogri feminine ending. The target noun and its agreement pattern carry their own grammatical organization.
The same caution applies in reverse during review: a target child noun with its expected prefix is not evidence that the source referred to a boy. A translation can preserve a human reference while moving from Dogri gender agreement to Swahili class agreement. Sex, noun class and number are separate questions.
Different things require different forms of the same descriptive stem
The Georgia course gives kisu kizuri and visu vizuri for a good knife and good knives, alongside mti mzuri and miti mizuri for a good tree and good trees. These contrasts show why a single Swahili ending cannot replace every Dogri good-form across objects.
A Dogri list describing a tree, a knife and a child may use source agreement determined by those nouns’ own genders and numbers. Swahili needs the target nouns’ class relationships instead. Sharing the same positive description does not require every target adjective to have an identical prefix.
This matters for a short inventory or school message, where the nouns can be clear but a copied agreement form can attach the wrong grammatical pattern. Identify the Swahili noun being described each time. A source feminine ending is not an instruction to use one fixed Swahili class, and a source masculine ending is not an instruction to use another.
The verb packages person reference and time differently
The course analyzes mtoto a-na-cheza, a-li-cheza and a-ta-cheza as examples of a child playing now, playing or having played in the past, and playing in the future. The verbal sequence includes grammatical information inside the word. A target without a separate tense word is not necessarily missing time reference.
Dogri’s cited past transfer example can show feminine agreement associated with the transferred book rather than the male actor. That source pattern should not be used to identify the subject prefix of a Swahili verb. Establish who acts before reading target verbal agreement; the gender of the source object cannot stand in for the target subject.
In this direction, a useful distinction is between the noun-class agreement attached to a description and the information packaged into a predicate. A Dogri adjective ending, an object-related past agreement form and a Swahili verbal prefix do not all answer the same question. Preserve the child or other actor, the item described and the intended time through their respective target constructions.
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