Dogri to Tongan: pointing to a place differs from naming a recipient
Source proximity does not determine the target word’s position
Sawhney’s Dogri description distinguishes proximal and distal third-person forms and illustrates e before a noun in a description of a house. A translator can therefore encounter a short expression pointing to something already present in the conversation. Tongan also distinguishes demonstrative expressions, but a source word placed before a noun need not remain before that noun in the target.
The Lea Faka-Tonga learning resource describes ni and na as enclitic particles following nouns. Its attested falé ni identifies this house. A Dogri phrase with a preceding demonstrative requires the Tongan noun phrase to be rebuilt; retaining the source arrangement can obscure which house is being identified. This is a grammatical placement issue, not simply a preference about the order of equivalent words.
This house and here play different roles
The Tongan resource distinguishes noun-following demonstratives from location forms such as heni and hena. It gives Nofo ‘i heni, stay here. In a Dogri message about accommodation, pointing to this house and instructing someone to stay here may refer to the same physical place, yet one expression identifies a noun and the other establishes the location of an action.
That distinction prevents a misleading shortcut: replacing every source proximal form with a single Tongan word for here. A sentence discussing a house’s qualities needs a noun expression, while a direction about where to remain needs a location construction. Their shared physical reference does not make the expressions grammatically interchangeable.
Sawhney describes Dogri postpositions following oblique complements. A Tongan location expression instead needs the appropriate target construction around its place reference. Reversing a source postposition and calling the result a preposition does not decide whether the complement is a place, a demonstrative location or a person receiving something.
A destination and a recipient are not one undifferentiated to
The Tongan resource separates ki with places or common nouns, kia with personal names, and kiate with pronouns. Its book-giving example uses kia Sione for the named recipient. This is particularly relevant to Dogri transfer messages, where Sawhney illustrates a recipient marked separately from the transferred object.
Recover who receives the item before selecting the Tongan expression. A named person, a pronoun referring back to that person and a place where the item is sent require different choices in the resource’s patterns. Translating them through one fixed target word merely because each can be paraphrased with English to would erase a useful Tongan distinction.
A bare person reference can conceal the required choice
Dogri’s proximal and distal oblique pronouns help track people or things already mentioned. When such a form refers to the recipient of a delivery, the target must preserve that reference while using a pronoun-compatible recipient construction. When it refers instead to the destination as a place, the location construction is the relevant comparison.
For a short Dogri instruction, identify three things separately: what the speaker points to, whether that reference names an object or supplies a location, and whether the action is directed towards a person. This follows directly from the differing demonstrative placement and recipient constructions. It avoids turning an instruction about this house into a delivery to a person, or a transfer to someone into an unexplained location phrase.
Language references