Bosnian to Setswana: agreement must identify the intended group and the scope of only
A Bosnian gender category is not a Setswana noun-class instruction
Columbia’s Bosnian course explains agreement in gender, number, and case within a noun phrase. Its crvena knjiga and crvenu knjigu examples describe the same red book in different grammatical roles. The agreement endings help identify the source relationship, but their forms do not supply a Setswana noun-class concord.
SADiLaR’s Setswana grammar organizes pronouns and quantitative expressions by noun class. A reference to people and a reference to objects can therefore require different agreement even when both Bosnian expressions are plural. Identify the target noun being qualified rather than selecting one general equivalent of they or all.
All the people and the whole object have different referents
The Setswana grammar includes Batho botlhe ba kwa tirong for all the people being at work. Its quantitative tables distinguish forms agreeing with different noun classes. The expression for all is not an independent label that can simply be moved unchanged to any target noun.
For an original Bosnian statement about all the workers entering a building, the quantified group is the workers. In a different statement about the entire building being open, the quantification concerns one whole entity. The Bosnian writer may be emphasizing completeness in both cases, but the target must retain whether completeness concerns a group’s membership or the extent of an individual object. A recognizable all-like root cannot settle that relationship without its concord.
Only the children differs from children arriving without company
SADiLaR gives Go tlile bana bosi as only the children came or arrived. It also illustrates Ke tla tsamaya ke le nosi for going alone. These examples place restriction and solitary participation in different constructions rather than treating every only or alone meaning as interchangeable.
This matters when translating a Bosnian account of an event’s attendance. A statement excluding adults from the arrivals does not necessarily say that each child arrived unaccompanied. Conversely, one child traveling alone does not establish that no adults reached the destination by another route. Identify what the source excludes: another category of participant, company during the journey, or additional actions. Then preserve that scope in the Setswana construction.
A following pronoun can emphasize a noun without introducing another participant
The Setswana grammar describes absolute pronouns used for emphasis and contrast, including basadi bone in a contrastive reading concerning the women. A pronoun associated with an already named noun need not refer to a second group.
The Bosnian source may contrast the women’s response with the men’s response, or may simply report that the women answered. A target emphatic construction can make that contrast more prominent. Do not interpret the extra pronoun as evidence that somebody else joined the event; equally, do not add a contrast solely because the source already has a plural noun. Source agreement and target noun-class reference both organize relationships, but the intended comparison comes from the actual statement being translated.
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