Dogri to Turkmen: several objects do not always require a plural noun ending
Preserve the quantity before comparing word endings
Sawhney’s Dogri description distinguishes singular and plural nouns and illustrates plural agreement on declinable adjectives. A Dogri noun phrase can consequently show plurality in several visible places. Turkmen does not require all of those signals to remain visible in equivalent positions. The Peace Corps grammar explicitly illustrates quantity expressions in which the noun remains formally singular despite referring to several objects.
Its example üç maşyn means three cars within a complete possession statement. The absence of a noun plural ending does not reduce the quantity to one. For this direction, retaining an accurate numeral can be more informative than reproducing every source plural marker. Read the whole quantified expression before deciding that a short-looking target noun has lost information.
A quantity question needs the same distinction
The Turkmen guide gives näçe jay in a question about how many houses people have. A request for an unknown quantity differs from a bare plural reference. A Dogri source asking about several possible houses should not acquire a definite count merely to make the target noun’s number easier to interpret.
Sawhney also notes that a Dogri cardinal can take an oblique form when its associated noun is oblique. This is another warning against matching endings by appearance. A source numeral’s altered form may reflect its grammatical environment, while a Turkmen noun without a plural suffix may reflect the quantified construction. Neither observation independently changes how many objects the sentence concerns.
A suffix for possession is not the noun’s quantity
Turkmen can also express the possessor through a suffix on the possessed noun. The Peace Corps guide contrasts a full phrase naming the owner with a shorter version whose noun suffix retains that information. It illustrates kakam for my father. A missing separate owner word and a missing plural suffix therefore have different possible explanations.
In Dogri, Sawhney lists separate first-person singular and plural genitive forms. When the speaker describes an item belonging to several people, identify the number of owners separately from the number of items. One shared possession does not become several possessions simply because the Dogri owner form means our; likewise, several items can still belong to one speaker.
A category label differs from a particular owner’s property
The Turkmen guide contrasts awtobus duralgasy, bus stop, with a genitive construction referring to a particular bus’s stop. This is useful when a Dogri noun combination can be read either as a type of place or as a relation to a specified vehicle. A translation should not create a particular owner merely because its target compound contains possessive-looking morphology.
The same distinction affects a short direction to a bus stop. The source may identify the kind of stop rather than describe property belonging to one bus. Determine that relation alongside the count: a category label, a named owner and a numerical quantity answer different questions. Their target suffixes cannot be interpreted as one general signal that more material should be added to match the Dogri phrase.
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