Dogri to Zulu: distinguish the owner from the noun that controls a possessive link
Dogri genitive agreement describes the head, not a new owner
Sawhney’s primary description of Dogri states that its genitive postposition agrees with the head in gender, number and case. Other postpositions in the account are indeclinable. That makes a change in the genitive form meaningful grammatically without necessarily changing the person who owns, or is related to, the item.
The same description illustrates meriɑ̃ ɡəllɑ̃ for the speaker’s talks and explains that genitive pronouns can function adjectivally and inflect for number. The plural belongs to the things being discussed; the speaker need not become several speakers. In Zulu translation, separate the owner’s reference from agreement information associated with the possessed head.
Dogri’s masculine–feminine distinctions also cannot directly select a Zulu noun class. When translating a genitive phrase, identify the head noun and its relationship first. The target noun chosen for a house, child, implement or component brings its own agreement requirements, even if the source groups several of those nouns under one grammatical gender.
Zulu links change with the possessed noun’s class
Sabelo’s primary study The Possessive in Zulu analyzes a possession, a connecting element and a possessor. It illustrates umuzi wakhe for a house belonging to a third person, and ingane yakhe for a child related to a third person. The change between wakhe and yakhe reflects the different head constructions; it is not a dependable male-owner versus female-owner contrast.
For a Dogri message referring to one person’s home and child, both relationships can involve that same person while the target forms differ. Copying a single connecting form across the two Zulu nouns merely because their Dogri owner is unchanged would confuse the agreement system with the reference system.
Sabelo also derives possessive links through sound combinations, including the loss or combination of vowels. Thus the target connection may not appear as a transparent sequence of separate dictionary words. When a Dogri genitive becomes a joined Zulu expression, assess the complete possessive construction rather than inserting a new word boundary to imitate the source postposition.
A part–whole description adds another head to track
Keet and Khumalo’s primary work on Zulu part–whole descriptions analyzes constructions using ingxenye, a noun meaning part. In the reading direction expressing that something is part of something else, the possessive connection is controlled by ingxenye. It is not selected directly from the class of whichever physical component happens to be mentioned first.
This matters when a Dogri technical description relates a component to a larger object. Translating a simple genitive phrase and explicitly saying that a component is part of a whole are different target constructions. If the latter introduces the noun for part, its agreement requirements enter the phrase too; the source head alone cannot determine every target link.
The study also distinguishes being a structural part from being contained somewhere or belonging to a collection. For a Dogri description using a broad genitive relationship, determine whether the item is a component, contents or a member before expanding it into an explicit Zulu relation. Otherwise the translation could describe something placed inside an object as though it were one of the object’s permanent components.
Language references