Dogri to Tatar: ownership endings, question placement and vowel distinctions
Whose book is it? Read a different kind of ending
Dogri possession can involve a genitive form that agrees with the thing possessed. Sawhney describes this head agreement for da and for possessive forms. Tatar instead provides a particularly useful contrast in endings attached to the possessed noun: китабым means my book, китабың your book, and китабы his or her book. The final change identifies the owner’s grammatical person; it is not a substitute for Dogri masculine or feminine agreement.
For a Dogri message about returning someone’s book, first establish who owns it. An ending that looks small on the Tatar noun can carry the distinction between the speaker’s property and the recipient’s. Conversely, китабы does not by itself decide whether the owner is male or female. Do not interpret the absence of a gender distinction in that example as failure to translate a source reference. The ownership relation survives through a different grammatical contrast.
A greeting is not a universal question-building model
The Tatar grammar published by the Institute for Bible Translation places the ordinary question particle, conventionally represented as -my or -me in romanization, after personal endings. It specifically notes a different order in the greeting Isänmesez? A familiar greeting therefore makes a poor pattern for constructing an unrelated question about a booking or journey. Recognizing the whole expression is safer than treating every internal piece as a freely reusable formula.
Dogri also distinguishes familiar tu from plural or respectful tuss. When the source addresses one person respectfully, neither the number of people nor the desired question construction should be inferred from plural-looking material alone. Determine the intended addressee and whether the message actually asks a question. The Tatar grammar explains that ordinary questions with an interrogative pronoun or adverb generally do not require the yes–no particle; it separately discusses rhetorical exceptions. A request for information and a request for confirmation consequently need different analysis, even when both end with a question mark in the source.
Do not replace vowel distinctions with a Dogri sound approximation
The Tatarstan Academy’s account distinguishes the front vowels ә, ө and ү from back а, о and у and describes vowel harmony. These distinctions matter when moving from Dogri writing to Tatar Cyrillic: a rough sound resemblance is not sufficient grounds for exchanging one letter with another. The target vowel system provides contrasts that the source spelling does not directly encode in the same way.
Dogri’s phonemic tone adds a separate complication. Tone information in a Dogri word cannot be represented simply by choosing a front Tatar vowel, and a Tatar vowel letter does not function as a tone mark. Translate the lexical meaning before assessing the target spelling. Where a name must be retained rather than translated, distinguish a spelling decision about that name from the vowel choices in ordinary Tatar vocabulary and grammatical endings.
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