Czech to Bhojpuri: read counted nouns as quantities, not accidental owners
Czech counted nouns can change form without changing the count
Czech numerals interact with noun case and agreement. A translator into Bhojpuri should recover the number and the counted entity before interpreting each source ending. Different Czech forms may describe the same number of people in different grammatical roles, rather than different quantities.
The Czech Academy’s handbook contrasts pět mužů with pěti mužům in its numeral paradigm. The former includes five men in a direct-case construction, while the latter expresses the dative relation. The change from pět to pěti and from mužů to mužům does not turn five men into another group size.
This is useful in a Czech instruction about allocating something to five people. The source dative identifies the relation to the recipients; its numeral and noun forms should not be translated as separate lexical meanings. The Bhojpuri wording needs the same count together with the intended recipient relation.
Czech genitive morphology is not automatically ownership
The handbook explains that numerals from five upward have a special relation with the counted noun in direct cases. The genitive plural after the numeral therefore need not represent a possessor. Reading the noun ending as an owner relation can introduce an of-phrase which changes the meaning.
Thakur’s Bhojpuri grammar gives bis bʌris for twenty years. Its gloss contains the numeral and year noun without reproducing a Czech-style genitive-plural construction. The target expression illustrates why preserving the quantity does not require copying the source noun’s visible case morphology.
For a Czech duration, distinguish what is being measured from who owns anything mentioned nearby. A period of years and a person’s documents can appear in the same sentence, but their source genitives may have different grammatical explanations. The target should express each relation according to its meaning.
A target classifier and source agreement solve different problems
Thakur’s Bhojpuri noun-phrase discussion includes eɡo, analysed as one plus a classifier, in a phrase about a new turn. This shows a target device that does not correspond to Czech masculine, feminine or neuter agreement on the numeral one. The construction should be interpreted in its own noun phrase, not treated as an ornamental extra syllable.
The CzechEncy cardinal-numeral entry describes gender agreement on jeden and distinct masculine versus feminine or neuter forms for two. These source distinctions identify grammatical compatibility with the noun; they are not labels selecting Bhojpuri classifier forms.
A translation involving a count therefore needs several separate readings: the numerical value, the entity counted, its role in the clause and the target counting construction. The Czech ending may contribute agreement or case rather than another unit of meaning. The Bhojpuri examples here follow Thakur’s chiefly Bara-Parsa-based description, so they should not be expanded into an unsupported claim that every Bhojpuri variety or every counted noun must use identical morphology.
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