Bodo to German: sie can change number while Sie changes the address relationship
The target spelling does not reveal the participant by itself
Narzary’s Bodo paradigm distinguishes singular third-person reference from plural reference and separately marks honorific forms. Those source distinctions must be retained when the target uses a word with several possible functions.
The original deutsch.info lesson explains that German sie can be singular or plural, while capitalized Sie is a formal address form applying to one or several people. A Bodo report about one woman, a report about several people, and an address to a respected listener can therefore yield similar-looking German strings. The clause and speech situation must identify which meaning is intended.
A neutral source third person is not evidence for a particular German gender
Narzary states that Bodo personal pronouns do not distinguish gender. An ordinary or respectful third-person singular form consequently does not itself select German er, sie, or es. Honorific status is not a gender feature.
Deutsch.info describes German personal reference as following the gender of the noun being resumed and illustrates a masculine cupboard with er. For a Bodo passage about an object, the chosen German noun’s grammatical properties matter; biological sex is not the deciding question. For a person, establish the intended referent rather than infer gender from the presence of a respectful source form.
Changing case need not change the person
Narzary distinguishes Bodo subject forms from direct-object and indirect-object forms. Their different endings identify grammatical roles rather than a succession of unrelated people. That source distinction should guide the corresponding target clause.
The German teaching table similarly distinguishes er, ihn, and ihm across nominative, accusative, and dative. A target sentence can therefore refer to the same participant through visibly different words as their role changes. Do not normalize every occurrence to one dictionary form, and do not assign a different person merely because the source and target use different kinds of case marking.
A possessor and a recipient must remain separate
Narzary describes Bodo personal possessives with -ni, including bini for his or her. That construction identifies ownership, unlike the separately listed object forms. In a source message about giving someone their own item, the person can be both recipient and owner without those roles becoming one grammatical expression.
IDS grammis distinguishes personal and possessive pronoun categories, while deutsch.info shows different German forms for case-marked personal reference and possession. Reconstruct the Bodo event before choosing them: who gives, who receives, and whose item is involved. Formal Sie does not settle the actual number of recipients, and a gender-neutral Bodo possessive does not establish the German possessor form. Following these relationships across the clause prevents a fluent German result from changing the source’s audience, ownership, or distribution of participants.
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