Lower Sorbian to Rundi: people, places and the information inside a verb
Male and female people can share the same agreement prefix
Cox’s Kirundi course pairs umugabo with abagabo for a man or men and umugore with abagore for a woman or women. Both sets use the illustrated human-class number pattern. A Lower Sorbian source’s masculine or feminine distinctions do not therefore select two different Rundi class prefixes for these nouns. The lexical noun identifies the kind of person; class and number organize agreement.
The course contrasts arakora with barakora for one person working versus several. For Lower Sorbian input, preserve whether the source describes an individual or a group without expecting the target verb prefix to encode the same gender distinction. The source dual adds another consideration: exactly two participants remains useful information even though the target example’s plural does not independently specify a pair.
A place reference can be attached after the verb
A typological study of Lower Sorbian illustrates na domje, on a house, with a preposition before the noun. Rundi can also carry locative reference after a verb. Devos, Misago and Bostoen’s corpus study illustrates Baravahó, barageenda, where the first verb includes reference to the place left. An output without a separate word corresponding to source there need not have lost the location.
The study distinguishes locative elements -ho, -ko, -mwo and -yo and documents both their grammatical distribution and extensions beyond literal location. They should not be inserted as interchangeable substitutes for every Lower Sorbian preposition. Establish whether the source refers to an explicitly named place or resumes a place mentioned earlier. Then interpret the target construction’s actual relation to that place.
This matters in an account where a person first arrives at a building and later leaves it. The source can repeat a location expression, while a Rundi verb can refer back to it compactly. The translated reference must still identify the same place and distinguish movement toward it from movement away from it.
Identification and location need not use the same be expression
Cox introduces ni and its negative si for identification or state descriptions, while restricting their use with location complements in the stated lesson. The course explicitly notes an exception when the subject itself is a place. This is a constructional contrast, not a universal ban on using ni anywhere near a place name.
For a Lower Sorbian passage identifying someone as a teacher and then saying where that person is, those clauses perform different jobs. Reusing a Rundi identification pattern unchanged for the location clause could misrepresent the second assertion. Likewise, a location enclitic in the preceding section does not supply the person’s occupation.
Read the source as three linked claims: who the person is, how many people are involved and where the event occurs. Rundi can distribute these meanings through a lexical noun, agreement prefixes and locative constructions. A compact target word is useful only when those relationships remain intact.
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