Bodo to Sesotho: plurality must reach the words agreeing with the noun
A source repeated adjective is not a target agreement prefix
Narzary documents Bodo descriptions where repeating an adjective contributes a plural interpretation although the noun has no plural suffix. A reader can therefore recover several items from the phrase even when the isolated noun looks unmarked for number.
Demuth’s Sesotho account describes a different organization: noun class connects a noun with agreement elsewhere in the expression. Its examples include mo-tho, person, and ba-tho, people. When a Bodo repeated adjective identifies several people or items, the Sesotho translation needs the appropriate noun phrase and its agreement, rather than expecting adjective repetition to do the target work.
The subject and the object can require different agreement
Demuth illustrates a sentence about children liking fresh milk. The subject marker follows the children’s noun class, while the adjective describing the milk follows the milk’s class. The two agreement relations coexist in one sentence without referring to the same participant.
For a Bodo translation, identify which source expression the description modifies. If several people evaluate a substance, their number must not automatically spread to the adjective describing that substance. Conversely, a plural Bodo description of objects does not make the people handling them plural unless the source actually says there is more than one handler. Target agreement must preserve those distinct source relationships.
A substance plural may describe kinds rather than individual units
Demuth notes that applying a plural class marker to the illustrated milk stem gives a types-of-milk interpretation. This is an important warning against converting every Bodo collective or plurality clue into an ordinary count of separate physical items.
Narzary’s Bodo study provides collective expressions for bees, cattle, and dancers. Such groups are not equivalent to kinds of a substance. If the source contrasts a herd of cattle with the milk they produce, its cattle collection does not establish that the milk is being divided into varieties. A Sesotho noun-class change can therefore introduce a distinction absent from the Bodo passage unless the substance interpretation is established first.
Class membership is not a translation of the owner
Demuth’s agreement system also includes possessive expressions. Narzary’s Bodo personal possessives instead offer forms marked with -ni. The person possessing something and the class of the thing possessed must consequently remain separate analytical questions.
In an original Bodo description of a group’s new clothes and its cattle, the same group can own both collections. That stable owner does not mean every Sesotho agreement element must look identical across the two possessed noun phrases. Nor does a change in a target noun’s class prove that the owner has changed. Recover the source possessions, their number, and their descriptive relations before constructing each target phrase. This is particularly useful when Bodo leaves the noun without a plural suffix but communicates plurality elsewhere: the target still needs a coherent class-and-agreement pattern for the actual referent, rather than a visual copy of the source’s ending.
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