Lower Sorbian to Khmer: preserve the unit being counted, not only the number
A number of items differs from a number of bundles
Stone illustrates Lower Sorbian quantification with strus rozow, a bunch of roses. The bunch is a quantity-bearing noun, while roses identifies what fills it. A translation must preserve that unit: one bunch is not necessarily one rose. This becomes especially important in Khmer, where a counted phrase can identify the kind of unit through a word following its number.
Northern Illinois University’s Khmer lesson contrasts banana quantities counted as individual fruits with quantities counted as hands of bananas. A Lower Sorbian shopping message can therefore be mistranslated even when its numeral is copied perfectly. If the target counts hands instead of individual fruits, the requested amount changes.
The target unit follows the number in the illustrated pattern
NIU presents a noun–number–specifier pattern and illustrates teachers counted with នាក់ and cows counted with ក្បាល. These unit words distinguish categories of referents in that lesson. They are not extra people or animals added after the actual count.
Lower Sorbian readers may instead look for the quantity head and its inflected complement. Stone explains that a noun quantified by a quantity noun stands in the genitive, while the quantifier’s own case follows its role in the sentence. A Khmer target can preserve the relationship without displaying a corresponding genitive ending on the counted noun.
For a source request involving a bundle, a weight or individual items, recover which expression carries the unit before arranging the Khmer phrase. Simply moving the Lower Sorbian noun ending into a separate target word would miss the fact that the target specifier contributes a counting interpretation.
Two people should not acquire an animal-counting unit
The NIU lesson explicitly distinguishes counting people from counting animals and warns against confusing those specifiers. Lower Sorbian grammatical gender is not a substitute for this semantic distinction. A masculine or feminine source noun does not by itself identify which Khmer unit is appropriate.
A Lower Sorbian source about two teachers can mark dual number. The target must retain a count of two people, while using a people-compatible construction. Treating the dual as a general instruction to count heads because heads come in a pair would confuse source number with the target unit’s referent category. The same count can require different Khmer unit words for people, animals and objects.
Weight and currency do not count individual objects
NIU also illustrates kilograms for a meat quantity and riel for money. These are measurement units, not plural markers on the thing measured. A Lower Sorbian genitive complement can likewise occur inside a quantity expression, but its ending does not tell the translator to discard the unit and count pieces instead.
This matters when a source distinguishes two units of weight from two separate portions. The target needs the same measurement claim, rather than an unspecified number of objects carrying a copied numeral. Preserve the unit even when the resulting phrase has a different word order and fewer inflectional endings.
The Khmer lesson notes spoken omission of specifiers, so its patterns should not be treated as a rule that every informal utterance visibly includes one. Nevertheless, when an original Lower Sorbian message distinguishes individual items from bundles or measures, that distinction must remain recoverable. The source quantifier and the target unit expression need to be interpreted together.
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