Bodo to Setswana: a shortened family word can retain the owner
Two compact expressions may encode comparable relationships
Bodo bipha means his or her father in Basumatary’s account. The third-person owner is already incorporated into the family expression. A Setswana target need not print an independent owner word to preserve that information, because some target kinship constructions can likewise contract.
The SADiLaR grammar portal gives rraagwe as a contracted expression for his or her father. It relates the form to a construction with a separate possessive element. A Bodo reader should therefore not assume that a short target family word has omitted the owner merely because it appears as one written unit.
The comparison concerns meaning, not a shared suffix inventory. Bodo bi- and the Setswana contracted material are not pieces to exchange letter for letter. Establish which person anchors the relationship, then recognise the complete target kinship form appropriate to that owner.
The same owner appears with different linking material
Basumatary contrasts compact kinship ownership with a separate genitive construction such as bi-ni bizab, that person’s book. Setswana also has ordinary noun phrases in which the owner follows linking material associated with the possession.
Compare the portal’s ditlhako tsa gagwe, his or her shoes, with its contracted father expression rraagwe. A Bodo reader moving between bi-ni plus a possession and bipha already encounters two source ways of anchoring a noun to the same third person. Setswana likewise need not expose identical word boundaries in the two target phrases. The contrast is between ordinary noun-linked possession and a contracted kinship expression, rather than between two owners.
A Bodo message listing someone’s relatives and belongings can consequently produce a mixture of contracted target forms and separate possessive constructions. Requiring every target phrase to repeat the same visible sequence would ignore the noun-linked grammar. Conversely, a similar-looking ending should not conceal a change from one owner to several: the portal distinguishes third-person singular gagwe from plural-owner bone.
Family ownership is broader than one person’s possession
The Setswana portal separately discusses communal possessive expressions for a family or community. Such forms can describe something belonging to the family rather than one named individual. A Bodo compact word meaning my father does not on its own imply that every following possession belongs to the whole family.
If a source contrasts the writer’s own item with an item shared by the household, that distinction deserves a corresponding target reading. A communal expression could be appropriate for the second but would broaden the owner of the first. The mere presence of a kinship noun is not sufficient evidence for collective ownership.
This also affects personal reference after a list. Bodo bi is gender-neutral, and Setswana’s cited third-person owner expressions cover his or her. The absence of a male-versus-female distinction in the possessive is therefore not automatically missing information. More useful questions are whether the owner is one person, several people or a household, and whether the kinship expression is contracted. Keeping those alternatives distinct preserves the source family relationships while allowing the Setswana noun class and possession constructions to determine the written form.
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