Filipino to Dogri: what siya leaves unspecified in a report
Identify the person without inventing a gender
Filipino siya can refer to a man or a woman. Northern Illinois University’s Tagalog pronoun table explicitly provides both readings. In the university’s short narrative about Jose, repeated siya refers back to the previously named person; the pronoun itself has not gained a separate masculine ending. For Filipino into Dogri, this means that identifying a third-person participant and selecting the target’s agreement pattern are different tasks.
The same source separates singular siya from plural sila. Preserve that distinction even when an English paraphrase might use they for a single unidentified person. The Tagalog-based Filipino form does not authorize turning one individual into several participants. Nor does an isolated siya establish which gendered Dogri form a particular sentence requires. A preceding named referent or an explicit description may supply information that the pronoun alone does not.
Dogri verb morphology can carry information absent from the pronoun
Jamwal, Gupta and Sen’s study of Dogri finite-verb generation describes subject gender and number as factors affecting the forms in its paradigms. Its tables distinguish masculine and feminine constructions rather than treating the verb as a fixed dictionary item. Applied to Filipino siya, a target ending can therefore express a distinction that was not overt in the source pronoun. This is not evidence that Filipino omitted the action; it is a difference in how grammatical information is distributed.
The study is a morphological-generation investigation, not a rule that every Dogri verb always agrees with whichever noun comes first. Its practical relevance is narrower: a plausible Dogri root is insufficient by itself, because the selected construction also needs an appropriate inflected form. Where the source identifies the participant clearly, agreement should follow that participant in the target construction. Where it does not, a machine-selected ending should not be treated as independent proof of the person’s identity.
An auxiliary may matter as much as the main verb
Ved Kumari Ghai’s Dogri overview notes gender agreement in auxiliary forms and contrasts a king’s and a queen’s completed departure. The gender distinction is consequently not confined to a translated equivalent of siya. A Filipino report can retain the intended third-person referent while still needing more than one correctly coordinated element in Dogri. Checking only the target pronoun would miss that relationship.
Ghai also gives migi for to me and tugi for to you. These illustrate a second reason to establish participant roles before replacing pronouns: the person receiving or affected by an action is not automatically its actor. In a Filipino report involving siya and a speaker or listener, keep that role assignment separate from gender agreement. Dogri can redistribute the relevant information across a personal form, a main verb and an auxiliary; copying the Filipino pronoun’s lack of gender marking into all three would not reproduce the source meaning faithfully.
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