Estonian to Dogri: kaduma reports disappearance without naming who lost the item
A missing object need not identify a responsible person
Mu võtmed on kadunud reports that the speaker’s keys are missing. It does not identify who lost them. The Estonian Language Institute’s kaduma entry gives this example and describes something becoming unseen and difficult to find. A Dogri translation should not add an accusation against the speaker or another person merely because the lost item has an owner.
Compare Pliiats kadus with Ta kaotas pliiatsi. The first presents the pencil’s disappearance; the second names someone in a losing event. The object may be the same, but the source gives different information about the participants. That difference should remain visible in a lost-property report.
Dogri has a relevant intransitive–transitive contrast
Udita Sawhney’s morphological description demonstrates Dogri forms for a pen getting lost and a person losing a pen. The article treats these as a contrast between an intransitive event and a transitive construction. This is directly relevant to Estonian kaduma versus a source sentence that explicitly names the person losing something.
The examples do not mean that every Estonian intransitive verb can be translated by attaching one Dogri suffix. The paper gives particular lexical pairs, and the appropriate Dogri expression still depends on the item and construction. What transfers is the distinction between reporting the item’s loss and identifying an actor in the event.
In Minu pliiats kadus, minu identifies ownership, not grammatical agency. Turning the possessive into a Dogri subject meaning that the speaker lost the pencil would add a stronger claim. A colleague might have misplaced it, or the writer might simply not know what happened. Ma ei kaotanud pliiatsit denies the speaker’s losing it; it does not establish that the pencil is currently found.
Disappearance, damage and loss of interest are different complaints
The Estonian dictionary also uses kaduma for an interest, hope or problem ceasing to exist. Poisil kadus huvi õppimise vastu concerns lost interest in studying, not a physically missing object that can be retrieved from a drawer. The Dogri pen example should not be copied literally into this abstract use.
Likewise, Võti on katki reports a broken key, while Võti on kadunud reports a missing one. A repair request and a search request call for different responses. The translation should not substitute damage for disappearance just because both can prevent opening a door.
Finally, Pliiats võib kaduda expresses a possibility of future loss, whereas Pliiats kadus reports a disappearance. Sawhney’s pen examples themselves differ in tense as well as transitivity, so they are evidence for the structural contrast rather than a ready-made past-tense translation for every scenario. Preserving whether loss is predicted, already observed or explicitly attributed to someone keeps the Dogri account aligned with what the Estonian writer actually knows.
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