Catalan to Inuktitut: count the owners separately from the objects
A Catalan plural does not distinguish two from more than two
Catalan ordinary plural noun phrases can describe a pair or a larger group. South Qikiqtaaluk Inuktitut distinguishes dual from a plural referring to more than two in the Tusaalanga lessons. A translation may therefore need a count that the source plural ending leaves unstated.
The lesson contrasts matu, one door, with matuuk, two doors, and matuit, three or more doors. These romanised examples illustrate number distinctions; they are not a claim that Latin letters are the only writing system for the target language.
If a Catalan source says that two doors should remain open, the target should retain the pair rather than merely express an unspecified plurality. If the source identifies several doors without establishing exactly two, a dual form could impose a count the writer did not supply.
The source numeral can provide the missing distinction, but so can a preceding description. A later Catalan plural may refer back to two items already named. The target number choice must follow that reference rather than consider only the last noun phrase in isolation.
Our does not count the possessions
Catalan llur and llurs provide a particularly useful warning about two different counts. As the IEC explains, the owner is plural in both forms; the change from llur to llurs concerns singular versus plural possessions. A source containing llur does not mean one owner simply because the possessive lacks a final plural ending.
The IEC explains that Catalan possessives agree with the noun they accompany. In a phrase identifying our house, the source singular agreement concerns the house; it does not tell the translator whether two people or a larger group own it.
This matters even though llur is regionally and stylistically restricted: it is habitual in Northern Catalan and appears in very formal usage elsewhere. A literary or institutional source may therefore identify plural ownership explicitly while leaving the owner group’s size unstated. The Inuktitut dual-owner distinction still cannot be recovered from the Catalan possessive ending.
The South Qikiqtaaluk paradigm supplies illuvuk for one house owned by two people and illuvut for one house owned by a larger group. Apply that distinction to the owners established by the Catalan paragraph. Neither a plural source owner nor a plural source possession settles both counts at once.
A kinship relationship uses the same ownership machinery
Tusaalanga explains that possessive endings also mark relations, including family relationships. The source Catalan possessive may thus correspond to morphology inside a target kinship noun rather than a separate word before it.
The IEC notes Catalan kinship constructions with restricted unstressed possessives, such as mon pare. Such a source form identifies a family relation; it does not establish a stronger or different ownership claim than an appropriate stressed possessive construction.
When a Catalan family message mentions two relatives of one person or a relative shared by several people, distinguish the relative count from the related-person group. The target ending can encode both dimensions in ways unlike Catalan agreement. The cited lessons also show that some third-person possessed plural forms share an ending, requiring context to recover the owner. These observations are scoped to South Qikiqtaaluk teaching forms, so another regional variety should not be assumed to reproduce every ending identically.
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