Assamese to Sesotho sa Leboa: a plural-looking greeting may address one person
Read the greeting as an exchange
Unisa’s Northern Sotho lesson gives Dumelang for a greeting even to one person and explains its respectful use. It also pairs Le kae?, literally “Where are you?”, with Re gona, literally “We are here,” as an exchange about well-being. A literal back-translation can therefore misrepresent what the speakers are doing.
This is useful for Assamese messages because respect can also affect source pronouns and agreement. Do not decide that a Sesotho sa Leboa greeting has changed the number of addressees merely because it looks plural. At the same time, do not turn the well-being question into a request for a location unless the actual context requires location.
Keep both sides of a short Assamese greeting when translating. A reply can be idiomatic and appropriate without matching the source word for word. The practical test is whether the recipient recognizes an enquiry about how they are, rather than an unexplained question about their whereabouts.
Social address does not always name a family relationship
The Unisa materials describe family terms used as forms of address according to age and relationship. A word associated with a parent or sibling can therefore show respectful or friendly treatment without claiming literal kinship.
Assamese kinship expressions can carry their own person and honorific information. When a source message introduces an actual relative, preserve that factual relationship. When it merely addresses an older acquaintance politely, do not invent a parent-child connection in the target.
The distinction becomes important in a family invitation. Identify whether the person is being addressed, introduced, or described as someone’s relative. Those three jobs can involve similar respectful attitudes but require different reference. Keep the established name where it resolves whose relative is meant.
Agreement belongs to target noun classes
The North-West University grammatical annotation resource distinguishes noun-class concords in Northern Sotho. These are not direct replacements for Assamese honorific agreement or human classifiers. A target concord can relate a verb or modifier to a noun class rather than convey a new level of respect.
Before editing repeated-looking short forms, identify which noun each element belongs to. An Assamese reader should not remove an agreeing marker simply because the full noun is already present. The target’s grammatical construction can require both.
Finally, confirm the actual audience independently of source honorific agreement, since Bharadwaj shows that Assamese can share such agreement across singular and plural subjects. For this direction, a useful review follows meaning in layers: the greeting’s conversational function, any genuine family relationship, the count of addressees, and target agreement. That prevents a plausible-looking literal translation from turning a respectful welcome into an incorrect location question or a social address term into an invented relative.
Language references