Tibetan to Gujarati: a genitive ending does not tell you the possessed noun’s gender
Two systems choose possessive forms for different reasons
Jäschke’s historical Tibetan grammar describes alternative written genitive particles selected according to the preceding final letter. Among them are གི་ and ཀྱི་. A change between such particles is not evidence that the possessed object has changed grammatical gender. The relevant conditioning belongs to the Tibetan written form before the particle.
Kaushik Lele’s Gujarati lesson instead distinguishes મારો, મારી, and મારું according to the gender of the possessed noun. Thus a Tibetan ownership relation must be interpreted first and then rebuilt with the Gujarati noun’s properties. Copying the number of source syllables or choosing one Gujarati possessive for every Tibetan genitive would miss the target agreement.
Changing the owned noun can change the same owner’s form
Lele illustrates મારી દીકરી for my daughter and મારું ટેબલ for my table. The owner has not changed; the Gujarati nouns require different possessive forms. Jäschke gives the historical Tibetan possessive ངའི་, my. Its shape does not provide a Gujarati feminine or neuter agreement instruction.
In a list of someone’s belongings or relatives, repeated reference to one owner therefore does not imply repeated use of one identical Gujarati possessive. Conversely, a change from મારી to મારું does not mean that a different person owns the next item. This is especially useful when a Tibetan passage compresses several relationships under a single understood speaker.
Adjectives must be fitted to the new noun phrase as well
Jäschke describes a common historical written order in which a genitive precedes its noun and an adjective follows it, while also recognizing a genitive construction with a preceding adjective. These alternatives warn against treating every Tibetan modifier as a sequence that can be copied without restructuring.
Lele’s Gujarati adjective examples place the describing word before its noun. His black-color forms vary with gender and number, whereas લાલ, red, stays unchanged in the examples. The Gujarati version of a Tibetan noun phrase must therefore select both the target modifier’s position and its actual inflectional behavior. Not every describing word follows the same agreement pattern.
Having an object and having relatives use different expressions
Lele distinguishes Gujarati possession with પાસે from kinship expressions using a to-type form. His car example uses મારી પાસે, while the example about brothers uses મને. Translating a Tibetan ownership or relationship statement requires identifying the relation being asserted, rather than inserting the same Gujarati possessive phrase wherever the source mentions a person.
Tibetan genitive spelling, Gujarati agreement, and the target possession construction thus answer three separate questions: how the source phrase is written, what grammatical properties the Gujarati noun has, and what relation holds between the participants. A change of script cannot perform those analyses. A well-formed Gujarati result may alter several endings while preserving exactly the owner, object, and relationship expressed in Tibetan.
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