Bulgarian to Rundi: counting things requires their noun class as well as their number
Two is not always one unchanged target word
Bulgarian distinguishes два with masculine nouns from две with feminine and neuter nouns. It also has personal forms such as двама in suitable human references. Rundi, also called Kirundi, organizes numeral agreement through noun classes. Its changes are not a direct translation of Bulgarian masculine, feminine, and neuter labels.
The FSI family dialogue illustrates babiri when answering how many children there are, but ibiri in a phrase specifying two years of age. The quantity is two in both places. The changed form follows the noun being counted, rather than the real-world fact that both quantities occur in one description of a child. Bulgarian две деца and две години use the same numeral form here, while the Rundi constructions distinguish their classes.
The counted noun can change differently too
After cardinal numerals, Bulgarian masculine nonhuman nouns frequently use a counted form rather than an ordinary plural: шест молива means “six pencils,” whereas моливи is the ordinary plural. That source morphology is a Bulgarian counting pattern, not evidence that the target noun should remain singular.
Rundi singular and plural noun prefixes belong to paired agreement classes. The FSI synopsis distinguishes a singular thing from plural things through prefixes represented as iki- and ibi-. It treats the two members of a number pair as different classes for agreement purposes. A Bulgarian counted form therefore needs interpretation as a quantity before the corresponding Rundi plural and numeral agreement are selected.
This also prevents a mistaken shortcut from Bulgarian adjective agreement. In шест нови речника, “six new dictionaries,” the adjective has ordinary plural form even though the masculine noun uses its counted form. The target cannot simply copy the Bulgarian adjective’s plural appearance onto each agreeing word. Each Rundi dependent follows the appropriate class pattern.
Compound numbers have an internal agreement site
Cox’s grammar illustrates twenty people and twenty cows with the same expression for twenty. For twenty-one, a following component supplies class agreement. Its example abantu mirongwibiri n’umwe means twenty-one people. Thus agreement does not require every piece of a complex numeral to change.
Bulgarian also has internal number structure: the final component can matter in compound expressions. The Rundi pattern nevertheless needs its own analysis. A translator must identify the units component, the counted noun’s class, and the connective joining the numeral parts. Preserving only the arithmetic value while treating the entire Rundi number as an invariant block can miss the agreement carried inside it.
Possession and counting use the same noun-class information differently
The FSI synopsis shows that class agreement affects possessives and verb subject prefixes as well as other dependents. Knowing a noun’s class therefore helps beyond choosing a numeral. It does not mean one identical prefix is copied everywhere: each grammatical series has its own forms.
For Bulgarian input, this matters when a counted phrase also contains “my,” “your,” or a finite predicate. Bulgarian gender, the special counted form, and the number of owners are separate source cues. Rundi must preserve those relations while selecting the class-conditioned numeral, possessive, and agreement forms required by the translated noun.
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