Arabic to Sesotho: greet the right audience and follow noun-class agreement
A greeting changes with its audience
The Dictionary of South African English records dumela as a Sesotho greeting and dumelang when more than one person is greeted. It also identifies lumela as the Lesotho orthographic form. For an Arabic speaker writing to a household rather than one individual, the audience is therefore part of choosing the target opening.
Do not interpret the d/l spelling difference by assigning it an Arabic sound value or assuming that one spelling must be a typographical error. Establish which Sesotho writing convention the recipient uses. Likewise, an Arabic greeting addressed to two people should remain addressed to those people, even though the target does not reproduce Arabic dual morphology in an identical way.
Agreement is not an Arabic masculine/feminine choice
Sesotho organizes nouns into classes that control agreement. Demuth’s grammatical sketch illustrates bana, “children,” with a matching subject marker ba, and lebese, “milk,” with agreement appropriate to its own class. This is a different system from deciding whether an Arabic noun and its adjective are masculine or feminine.
In a translated school notice about children and their food, check which noun each descriptive element belongs to. The children’s agreement and the milk’s agreement need not look alike within one sentence. An Arabic speaker should not regularize the target by making every nearby prefix match. The separate patterns can be exactly what identifies which property or action belongs to which noun.
Do not turn a repeated marker into a second participant
An explicit Sesotho noun and an agreeing marker on the verb can refer to the same subject. That combination is not automatically an unnecessary repetition or a reference to another group. Arabic also marks participant information on verbs, but its particular agreement patterns should not be used as a mechanical editing rule for Sesotho.
For an Arabic message equivalent to “the children will arrive,” locate the children as the intended actor before evaluating the target markers. Removing a short target element because the full noun is already present can interfere with Sesotho grammar. Adding another subject because a marker looks pronoun-like can instead change the meaning. Read the grammatical relationship rather than counting apparent participant words.
Keep the language identity and the practical details
Sesotho is Southern Sotho. It should not be substituted with Northern Sotho or Setswana simply because some words and structures resemble each other. Demuth’s discussion distinguishes these related languages. An Arabic instruction for a Sesotho-speaking school needs the requested language, not merely an expression recognizable somewhere in the wider Sotho group.
After that language check, compare the Arabic message’s exact number, time, and reference. An attached Arabic possessive may identify whose child or belongings are involved, while a dual may indicate exactly two. Those details should remain recoverable even when Sesotho uses a differently organized phrase. In this direction, a reliable review combines the appropriate audience in the greeting, the right noun-class relationships, and the same concrete arrangement described in the Arabic source.
Language references