German to Sesotho: a relative clause must retain the person’s role
German die can conceal two different relationships
In German die Leute, die kochen, the people perform the cooking. In die Leute, die ich mag, the people are the ones liked by the speaker. The relative pronoun looks the same, but its role changes. IDS explains that German relative pronouns take their case from their function inside the relative clause, while gender and number relate to the expression being described.
Demuth’s primary Sesotho grammatical sketch distinguishes subject relatives from object or oblique relatives. Both use markers agreeing with the head noun’s class, but the two sets are not interchangeable. A translator therefore cannot select the target pattern simply because the German source has the familiar relative word die.
For this pair, identify the event inside the descriptive clause separately from the main statement. Are the people cooking, receiving something, or being liked? That answer determines which relationship the Sesotho relative construction must express. The main sentence may call those same people guests or neighbours without changing their role in the embedded event.
A Sesotho object marker is not an accidental extra object
In the sketch’s object-relative construction, a resumptive object marker appears inside the clause. Its segmented example ba-tho báo ké-ba-rát-á-ng describes people whom the speaker likes; the ba within the predicate refers back to those people. The extra reference is part of the construction described, rather than evidence that a second group is liked.
German die Leute, die ich mag does not contain a matching ordinary sie after ich. Reading the Sesotho construction through that German arrangement can therefore make its internal object reference seem redundant. Deleting it merely to make the translation resemble the German word sequence would remove a grammatical relationship the target construction expresses.
The distinction is useful in descriptions identifying a subset of people: those the writer invited, those a colleague knows, or those a customer prefers. Preserve which people the description selects and which person performs its action. A main-clause subject and a relative-clause subject need not be the same, even when the paragraph repeats the same group noun.
Relative marking can involve the predicate as well as the opening word
Demuth also describes relative -ng on the first verbal element, with its location depending on the construction. Her comparison of cooking with past-continuous cooking illustrates that the marker need not attach to the lexical verb in every case. This is another reason not to treat a relative clause as an ordinary clause with one opening translation of German die added.
German relative clauses have their own verb-final arrangement. That order helps a German reader find the subordinate predication, but it does not prescribe the Sesotho placement of every marker. A German clause with several verbal elements must be interpreted for its action and time relationship before its target predicate is assembled.
Consider the difference between identifying people who cook and identifying people who were cooking at a particular time. The relative relationship stays attached to people, but the temporal construction changes. A successful Sesotho rendering keeps both layers: which group is being identified and how its activity is situated in time. Copying the shortest present-tense relative pattern into every German description would preserve only part of that meaning.
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