Bhojpuri to Sesotho sa Leboa: grammatical number and courtesy do different work
A plural-looking greeting need not address a crowd
Thakur’s Bhojpuri account distinguishes honorific रउआ from expressions explicitly referring to several listeners. Sesotho sa Leboa also has courtesy patterns that cannot be interpreted by head count alone. Unisa’s course recommends Dumelang even when greeting one person and explains the respectful use of Le kae? in an enquiry about well-being.
The corresponding Re gona is taught as a reply meaning that one is well, although its literal form is plural. A Bhojpuri personal greeting should therefore be translated as an exchange, rather than rejected because every target form fails to look singular. Conversely, a narrative report about a real group must still preserve that group’s number.
Singular हम requires a different decision in an ordinary statement
Thakur records singular हम and plural हमनी. Outside a conventional greeting, the source participant count determines the target first-person construction. North-West University’s grammatical annotation distinguishes first-person singular and plural subject concords; the language does not generally collapse the distinction merely because a polite greeting uses plural forms.
This prevents two opposite mistakes. Reading Bhojpuri हम through standard Hindi can create an unintended target group. Treating every target plural form as a literal group can instead spoil a conventional courteous exchange. The kind of utterance, together with its actual participants, determines which interpretation is appropriate.
The noun class controls agreement beyond human gender
North-West University’s account distinguishes class-indicating subject, object, and possessive concords. Its short examples include se fihlile with a class-seven subject concord, and diaparo tša bana with a class-eight possessive concord. These forms show that agreement belongs to the grammatical class of the relevant target noun, rather than a direct masculine–feminine classification of people.
Thakur describes Bhojpuri plural expressions such as सब and लोग with differing distributions, including honorific uses. That source distinction does not identify every Sesotho sa Leboa noun class. A translation about objects cannot select target concords solely from whether the Bhojpuri phrase uses a human-associated plural expression or an ordinary plural expression. The target noun supplies the required class information.
Several written pieces can form one verbal construction
The North-West University annotation discussion treats ke, a, mo, and rata together as a linguistic verb even though they are written separately. A short target sequence can therefore contain subject and object information as well as the lexical action. Counting spaces is not a reliable way to decide how much of a Bhojpuri verb has been translated.
Bhojpuri auxiliaries follow the main verbal material in constructions described by Thakur. Their position does not prescribe where each Sesotho sa Leboa concord belongs. The target sequence must preserve who acts and who is affected through its own structure. This is especially relevant when a Bhojpuri object expression marked with के becomes target object agreement rather than an independently matching postposition.
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