Dogri to Yucatec Maya: body-part words do not all use the same possession pattern
A body part is related to a person, but the grammar still varies
A Dogri description of a portrait may mention the sitter’s hand, hair and tooth. All three belong in a description of the same person, but that shared relationship does not mean their Yucatec Maya noun phrases must have identical structure. The noun itself helps determine how possession is expressed.
Lehmann’s body-part account contrasts “in k’ab”, my hand, “in tso’tsel”, my hair, and “in koh”, my tooth. The hair example contains additional relational material that the other examples do not share. His classification places body-part nouns in more than one possessive class.
For a Dogri art instruction, keep the intended person and body part clear before comparing the target endings. A different form alongside hair need not identify another sitter or add another strand. It may reflect the grammatical behaviour of that particular noun.
Dogri head agreement and Maya possessive classes are separate systems
Sawhney describes Dogri genitive marking as agreeing with the head noun’s gender, number and case. That provides one explanation for source-side variation around possessed nouns. It does not predict which Yucatec Maya body-part term takes which relational form.
Lehmann explicitly treats the target classes as grammatical, with membership only partly explained by meaning. It would therefore be unsafe to derive a complete rule from physical attachment alone. A tooth and hair can both be associated with the body while belonging to different grammatical classes in the account.
Suppose a Dogri caption changes from describing a person’s hand to describing that person’s hair. The owner stays constant, but the target phrase may change internally. Repeating the earlier pattern by replacing only the noun would ignore the distinction documented in the source.
Conversely, a changed owner needs to remain a changed owner. In a drawing exercise comparing two portraits, grammatical differences between body-part terms should not distract from whose hand or hair is being described. Keep noun classification and person reference as two separate checks.
One body-part term may cover a wider region than the source label
The same reference lists k’ab with hand and arm meanings, and ook with foot and leg meanings. These glosses warn against assuming that every anatomical division in a Dogri description has a separate one-word target equivalent in the documented usage.
For an illustration task, the relevant distinction might be the palm versus the whole arm, or the foot versus the leg. If the Dogri instruction depends on that contrast, a broad label alone may not give the artist enough information. Preserve the specified region through an appropriate fuller description rather than assuming the shared dictionary word settles it.
This does not mean that Yucatec Maya cannot distinguish the regions. It means that an English gloss accompanying a reference entry is not a complete instruction for translating every more specific source expression. The intended drawing supplies information that a short label may leave open.
Read the translated caption alongside its purpose: which person, which region and what feature should the viewer notice? Those questions help preserve the Dogri description without forcing every body-part noun into one ownership pattern or treating a wider lexical meaning as a missing concept.
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