Filipino to Bodo: a plural group is not a counted unit
The difference between they and two
Filipino supplies several ways to identify more than one participant without stating a numerical total. In NIU’s Tagalog-based lesson, sila identifies a third-person plural group; mga also remains in the demonstrated plural construction when a noun is replaced by a demonstrative. Neither device, by itself, means two. In a Bodo translation, first separate a reference to an already known group from a phrase that actually counts its members.
Basumatary’s Bodo examples put a classifier before the numeral and distinguish the kind of entity being counted. The fragment sa-nɯi counts two people, whereas ma-nɯi counts two animals, including fish in his example. A Filipino source identifying a plural human group is therefore not a reason to insert the Bodo numeral for two. A source that does specify two people supplies different information from one that merely says they arrived.
This distinction becomes particularly important with demonstratives. NIU illustrates plural reference with Nalanta ang mga ito, describing plants already introduced in the conversation. That sentence identifies which things withered without telling the reader how many there were. If a later Bodo sentence needs an exact count, the count must come from elsewhere in the message rather than from treating the Filipino plural marker as a numerical expression.
Counting a share does not count the people sharing it
The Bodo paper also gives phan for parts or shares, with phan-brɯi in an example about receiving four shares. Four shares and four recipients are different quantities. In a Filipino group message, the pronoun tells you who belongs to the receiving group; the quantity of portions tells you what that group receives. A translation can preserve one correctly and still misrepresent the other.
NIU’s pronoun contrast makes the recipient boundary explicit: kami excludes the person being addressed, while tayo includes them. Imagine a message allocating portions after a shared event. Whether the listener belongs to the group cannot be decided by counting the portions. Conversely, identifying an inclusive group does not establish that each person receives exactly one portion. Keep the membership decision and the distribution decision separate in the Bodo wording.
Our can describe ownership rather than the receiving group
The Filipino NG-series lesson pairs namin with exclusive our and natin with inclusive our. Its house example shows a possessive pronoun after the owned noun. A message about a household’s supplies may therefore identify ownership without making that household the actor or beneficiary of the next event. The listener’s inclusion in ownership also need not equal inclusion in every later activity.
The same lesson uses NG-series pronouns for actors in other constructions. Accordingly, finding namin is not sufficient to label the surrounding clause a possessive statement. Establish whether the source names an owner, identifies people performing an action, or refers to people receiving a quantity. Those distinctions prevent a Bodo translation from assigning the right number of items to the wrong group, even when its classifier and numeral are otherwise well formed.
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