Bambara Language

"What follows is the English translation of Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s 1972 text titled Aspects de la civilisation africaine: personne, culture, religion, which was translated by Susan B. Hunt of the University of Pennsylvania. The translation could be found online as late as 2009, but has since been taken down with no other copies on the internet. Luckily, I copied and pasted the translated text and saved it to my hard drive in 2008 and I am reuploading it for the community at large in pdf form."
–Asar Imhotep Madu-Ndela Institute The Martin Delany Center for Egyptology l'Institut Africain d'Études Prospectives (INADEP-Kinshasa | U.S.A.)

La disponibilité des corpus électroniques annotés comptant des millions de mots pour les langues maninka et bambara permet de penser des dictionnaires de nouvelle génération. Dans un tel dictionnaire, l'élaboration de la polysémie, combinabilité, valences syntaxiques, caractéristiques stylistiques, régionales et dialectales pour chaque lexème (et pour chaque sens du lexème) sera basée sur l'analyse du concordancier dérivé du corpus. Désormais, il devient possible d'évaluer statistiquement chaque trait caractéristique du lexème. Une analyse lexicographique, sur la base des concordanciers, est présenté sur l'exemple des lexèmes bambara bánban et jàhadi.

Written Bambara in Primary School
Language competence tests in the 5th grade carried out in Ségou in 1997 show that after four years of Bambara instruction, the children are far from mastering their mother tongue in the written medium. This article analyses 28 stories freely told from a picture, and defines the most frequent types of errors, systemised in three major fields: sentence division, word segmentation and transcription of the sounds that are written differently in Bambara and French. The aim of this analysis is twofold: to help the teachers give more efficient instruction in written Bambara by identifying the most difficult points for the pupils, and to attract the educational authorities’ attention to the fact that if the national languages are not equipped with grammars and orthographic rules, and the teachers are not properly trained to teach them, then mother tongue instruction will not help the children to improve their school results, nor will it develop the national languages as written means of communication.

La question d'une variété régionale du francais au Mali est  posée sous deux angles: les rapports entre facteurs inter- et intrasystemiques et les rapports entre substrat et variation diatopique du superstrat. L'hypothèse d'interférences n'est pas en effet en contradiction avec I'hypothese d' un francais panafricain qui s'intégrerait dans un francais panlectal. Les exemples montrent qu'il s'agit souvent de motivations multiples.

Les auteurs de l’article proposent des solutions à certains problèmes d’orthographe bamanankan jusqu’ici non-explorés, comme l’écriture des syllabes « consonne nasale + voyelle i ou u ». Ils suggèrent la notation des phonèmes gw et sh. Des listes complètes des morphèmes et des mots auxiliaires du bamanankan sont fournies. Les règles de notation tonale sont élaborées. Les questions de l’écriture collée ou séparée pour des types différents de constructions syntaxiques sont abordées.

Non-verbal predication and copula types are analysed in three Mande languages: Bambara, Guinean Maninka, and Eastern Dan. These languages display considerable divergences. In Bambara, there are three affirmative non-verbal copulas used in different construction types, comprising one formal class. In Guinean Maninka, there is only one non-verbal affirmative copula, and it can be omitted; there is a tendency toward its substitution with a focalization particle. The affirmative non-verbal qualitative construction is copulaless. In both these languages, there is also a verbal copula used in non-default context, and an ostentative copula going back to a verb whose lexical meaning is 'to look'. In Eastern Dan, copulas are diverse in nature: some are of verbal origin, while others go back to demonstrative adverbs. There are three series of inflectional auxiliary lexemes which are used both in verbal constructions and in constructions with non-verbal predicates, i.e. as copulas.

Loin des résultats attendus d'une alphabétisation fonctionnelle destinée à améliorer production agricole et organisation communautaire, disposer d'un cahier à soi est un des avantages que retirent de l'alphabétisation certains agriculteurs de la région cotonnière du Mali. Ces cahiers, du format d'un cahier d'écolier, ont un contenu très hétérogène, qui va du relevé de dates de naissance à la tenue d'une comptabilité, de la notation de titres de chansons entendues à la radio à la transcription de formules magiques, de la copie de prières à la consignation de résultats sportifs. Trois langues (français, bambara et arabe) et deux graphies (latine et arabe) s'y mêlent, inégalement maîtrisées par des scripteurs aux trajectoires diverses.

The Bambara foot is represented as a rhythmic category which can be disyllabic or monosyllabic. Foot-parsing is both segmentally and morphologically conditioned. A foot can coincide with a morpheme or be smaller than a morpheme, but it cannot include more than one morpheme. The main factors for foot-parsing are: types of initial consonants, types of internal consonants and vocalic combinations; directionality (left to right) is a secondary factor. Segmentation into feet is relevant for the realization of tone. Disyllabic feet are subdivided into two types, heavy and light; heavy feet have a long vowel in the initial syllable, while light feet have a short vowel in this position which is susceptible to elision (depending on phonotactics). It seems unnecessary to postulate stress in Bambara. The views of previous researchers on the Bambara foot are critically analyzed.

Arguments of a predicate and adjuncts behave differently with respect to Wh-extraction. Most current assumptions attribute this asymmetry to a single requirement on Wh-traces that adjunct traces fail to observe. Huang (1982) and Lasnik and Saito (1984) (henceforth HLS) suppose this requirement follows from the ECP. 1 Aoun (1984, 1986) assumes it to be the principle A of the Generalized Binding Theory (henceforth GEBI). This paper presents new data from Vata, a West-African language of the Kru family. Our main purpose here is to show that such analyses as HLS's and Aoun's are not sufficient to account for the full range of extraction possibilities and the distribution of Wh-traces. Instead , we argue that two distinct principles must be postulated: first, a principle like the ECP, requiring empty categories to be governed in an appropriate sense and, in addition, a second principle regulating the distance between a target of Wh-extraction and its immediate antecedent. Many possible alternatives come to mind to solve the problems that the Vata data reveal. Here we will limit ourselves to showing that the Condition on Long Extraction, argued for in Koopman and Sportiche (1985, 1986) will handle these problems straightforwardly and better than some existing alternatives. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 briefly describes the HLS account. In section 2, we present the Vata data. We discuss its theoretical implications and show why they pose problems for the HLS account. In section 3, our analysis is sketched. In section 4, we show why GEBI is not sufficient by itself and we briefly discuss the extension of GEBI proposed in Wahl (1985). 2

The goal of this study is to test instrumentally the hypothesis that Bambara disyllabic feet are distributed into three types. The results of the study can be summarised as follows:-reduction and elision of a short V1 in disyllabic feet is phonetic, rather than phonological, and can be explained by phonotactics. Therefore, disyllabic feet with a short first vowel form just one type;-V1 length, although phonologically relevant, displays some instability between speakers;-in a disyllabic foot (at least when its boundaries coincide with word boundaries), length characteristics are in complementary distribution: if the first vowel is short, the second is long, and if the first vowel is long, the second is short. This phenomenon can be defined as 'foot isochrony';-if the first vowel of a disyllabic foot is short, the duration of the second vowel depends on the position of the foot within the word: word-finally it is long, otherwise it is short;-the difference between disyllabic feet types in Bambara can be exhaustively described by means of the length of the first vowel; there seems to be no need to postulate the existence of stress.

This article explores one structural way in which Jula differs from other Manding varieties: the forgoing of formally reflexive constructions in favor of formally ambiguous intransitive constructions and more rarely innovative idiomatic transitive constructions. To do so, I draw on contextually elicited forms from 2012 fieldwork with 9 Jula speakers in Burkina Faso. Given the limitations of elicitation, I explore wider acceptability judgments and text artifacts to reveal that Jula speakers in Burkina frequently recognize and in fact use formally reflexive constructions typically attributed to other Manding varieties such as Bamanan. These findings suggest that these so-called Bamanan constructions are enregistered (Agha 2007) for a certain social domain as sociolinguistic high-forms. This study thereby reveals the limitations of a traditional dialectology approach to understanding how various Manding forms circulate across isomorphic boundaries.

Cette etude examine les caracteristiques prosodiques du francais parlé en Afrique. Nous nous intéressons  à la question de savoir si cette prosodie comporte des  traits communs, panafricains, ou si elle varie en fonction des Ll des locuteurs. À cette fin, nous étudions la prosodie de locuteurs de trois pays différents et de quatre systèmes prosodiques différents: le bambara et le tamacheq (parlées au Mali), le sango (parlé au Centrafrique) et le wolof (parlé au Sénégal). Nous basons nos analyses sur des données comparables, à savoir la lecture du texte PFC (Projet Phonologie du francais contemporain, www.projet-pfc) par quatre locuteurs par pays. La méthode s'inspire du projet Rhapsodie (http://rhapsodie.risc.cnrs.fr/fr/presentation.html). Cette méthodologie comporte deux étapes: il s'agit d'abord de détecter les syllabes perceptivement proéminentes et ensuite d'analyser la distribution, les corrélats acoustiques et la fonction des proéminences.
Il ressort de ces données qu'il existe, en Afrique, un systeme prosodique lexical qui se distingue du système prosodique post-lexical du francais standard parisien. La proéminence, au sein d'un groupe accentuel, sur plusieurs mots lexicaux, et même sur des mots fonctionnels, contribue sans doute à ce qui est percu comme un accent « africain ». On observe ensuite une distinction, dans le transfert de la prosodie, entre locuteurs de deux categories de langues africaines : les unes à ton lexical et les autres à accent lexical. La variation s'est cependant avéree souvent tributaire des facteurs sociodémographiques - notamment le niveau d'instruction et l'exposition au francais.

Different West African languages of the Gur and Mande families have a type of relative clauses additionally marked as conditionals. They function as generalizing relatives and occur often in proverbs. The paper proposes an analysis of these constructions in the Senufo languages Syer (Burkina Faso) and Supyire (Mali) and in the Manding variety Bambara (Mali). It discusses for each language first the formal aspects of the most typical relative clauses modifying a definite referent, then those of hypothetical and course of events conditionals. This aims at showing the cumulative marking of both the relative and the conditional in the third type, the conditional-relative clauses. In the last section I give an account of the generalizing function of the conditional-relatives arguing that the cumulation of formal means reflects the cumulation of functions. Thus, the encoding of an event in a conditional clause marks it as hypothetical, removing from it any property characteristic of a concrete instance of the event type. This abstraction from a concrete instance is most evident in course of event conditionals, which show a factual 'whenever' relationship between the event in the conditional clause and that in the main clause. A relative clause has the function to modify and restrict clausally the referent of a type of entity. The generalizing function of a conditional-relative clause is brought about by the fact that the restricting event is hypothetical and hence abstracted from a real event.

Notre étude sur la perception d’accent porte sur le FLS qui, rappelons-le, se distingue du FL1, du FL2 et du FLE par son mode d’appropriation. A notre connaissance, cette étude est la première sur le FLS qui confronte les représentations des auditeurs au signal acoustique et aux caractéristiques des L1 des locuteurs.
Une comparaison des commentaires des auditeurs aux performances des locuteurs a mis en évidence chez les auditeurs une aptitude certaine à définir les traits discriminants des différents accents.
Ces résultats auront un impact sur la notion même de variétés africaines de français. Les données que nous avons explorées indiquent en effet, au-delà de l’influence certaine de facteurs sociolinguistiques sur les variétés locales de français, que l’étiquette « français du Mali » cache une pluralité d’idiomes dans lesquels les structures linguistiques de la L1 jouent un rôle de premier plan.

E-publication can be downloaded at the following link: https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/488161

During the last two decades, the (re-)discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy.

However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the manuscripts. This book advances on the contrary a holistic approach to the study of these manuscripts and gather contributions on the different dimensions of the manuscript, i.e. the materials, the technologies, the practices and the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption.

The originality of this book is found in its methodological approach as well as its comparative geographic focus, presenting studies on a continental scale, including regions formerly neglected by existing scholarship, provides a unique opportunity to expand our still scanty knowledge of the different manuscript cultures that the African continent has developed and that often can still be considered as living traditions.

Le N'ko est une alphabet créé en 1949 pour les langues manding, surtout pour le maninka de la Guinée. Pendant les dernières décennies, il a devenu très populaire et pratiquement évincé l'alphabet latin en Guinée. Il se répand de plus en plus au Mali et autres pays de l'aire manding.

Bambara (Manding < West Mande < Mande < Niger-Congo) has a specialized clause chaining (cosubordinative) construction where the fi rst clause has a verb full-fl edged for TAM and polarity, and verbs of subsequent clauses are in infi nitive; non-initial clauses are not embedded into the initial one and cannot be therefore regarded as subordinate. Characteristics of the Bambara clause chaining are analyzed: scope of operators (illocutionary force, negation), TAM characteristics, same-and different -subjectness. From the evidence of peripheral Manding varieties, a hypothesis concerning the origin of infi nitive from an archaic preposition is advanced.

Separable adjectives represent a morphosyntactic subcategory of the part of speech of adjectives in Bambara (< Manding < Mande < Niger-Congo, Mali, West Africa). A separable adjective is a compound lexeme consisting of a noun root designating most often a body part, a qualitative verb root and a connector -la- ~ -lan- or -ma- ~ -man-. When used predicatively, the final component of a separable adjective (the qualitative verb root) is split from the rest of the form by the auxiliary word ka or man. Separable adjectives express mainly human qualities (moral or physical), and their semantics are very often idiomatic. The productivity of this subclass is limited.
In order to establish an inventory of the separable adjectives, two approaches have been followed: elicitation and a search in the Bambara Reference Corpus (which included roughly 4,110,000 words at the time of this study). The potentially imaginable number of lexemes of this type equals 570 (15 noun roots x 19 qualitative verb roots x 2 connectors). Elicitation provided 75 separable adjectives, and the corpus study, 25, 3 of which are absent from the elicitated list.
This experiment proves that in studies of derivative morphology, when a linguist needs to fill out a matrix, elicitation cannot simply be replaced by a corpus study. On the other hand, the corpus data provides invaluable supplementary data that cannot be obtained through elicitation.

В течение последнего десятилетия были созданы миллионные корпуса текстов манинка и бамана. Параллельно с этим ведется работа по созданию и совершенствованию словарей этих языков. Складываются условия для вывода лексикографической работы на принципиально новый уровень, который имел бы целью создание «корпусных словарей» (corpus-driven dictionaries). Это позволило бы гораздо детальнее и достовернее, по сравнению с «традиционными» словарями, представлять полисемию лексем, их сочетаемостные свойства, стилистические и регионально-диалектные характеристики каждого значения. В статье дается пробная разработка структуры словарной статьи глагола bánban на основании Справочного корпуса бамана.

Cette analyse est  basée sur des enregistrements faits à Bamako (Mali) en décembre 2006 et d’un test de perception effectué en décembre 2008 / janvier 2009.
Les tests de perception cherchent à déterminer les caractéristiques, réelles ou imaginaires, souvent stéréotypées, des accents, en alliant l’étude des représentations linguistiques à la variation diatopique (géographique), souvent aussi diastratique (sociale), et parfois diaphasique (stylistique) – mais plus rarement interférentielle (provenant d’un substrat ou d’un adstrat), comme c'est le cas dans cette étude. Il s’agit ici d’identifier les facteurs sociolinguistiques qui jouent dans l’identification de l’accent. Les taux d’identification des L1 sont ainsi mis en rapport avec les caractéristiques socio-démographiques des locuteurs, les représentations des auditeurs et le profil de ces derniers.

Reviews of Le Fil de l’écrit, une anthropologie de l’alphabétisation au Mali, by Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, ENS-éditions,2013.

By Jan Jansen in Africa, Volume 84/ Issue 04 / November 2014, pp 671-672 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0001972014000564

By Nathalie Carré in Études littéraires africaines, Numéro 38, 2014, p. 209-211 DOI : 10.7202/1028716ar 

By Béatrice Fraenkel in Langage et société 4/2015 (N° 154), p. 161-164 DOI : 10.3917/ls.154.0161

By Eric Jolly in Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2016/2, 71e année, no. 2, avril-juin 2016
pp. 549-55. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634463

By Alain Ricard in Research in African Literatures, Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2016, pp. 179-180.  https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631979

Bamako is, like most African capitals, an ethnic and linguistic
melting pot (Calvet 1994), where the official language French coexists with a number of regional and local languages. Our corpus reflects this multilingualism, with five L1s represented (Bambara, Fulfulde, Songhai, Tamasheq). An examination of the phonological characteristics of French in Bamako must therefore take into consideration the possible impact of L1 on our informants’ French pronunciation. Certain extralinguistic factors, which are particularly important given the sociolinguistic context of our study (see Skattum 2012) are also taken into account. Special attention is given to deviations from le français de référence (FR) that correspond to
regional or pan African tendencies.

In recent years, a growing number of linguists have reported constructions that fulfil all or most criteria for being called a passive but one: morphological or periphrastic marking in the verb phrase. In the constructions in question, passive semantics is conveyed through argument remapping, sometimes without the possibility for an oblique Actor by-phrase. The intransitive use of a transitive verb triggers a reversal of voice orientation: of the two participants of the active transitive verb, the Undergoer is linked to the one and only argument position, the subject. The Actor is either demoted to an oblique participant or not encoded at all, depending on the language. An example of such a zero-coded passive from the Mande language Jalonke is given in (2), which is the passive, intransitive equivalent of the transitive active clause in (1):

The main means for expressing the reciprocal meaning in Bamana is a syntactic construction with the specialized pronoun å¢g¡n which can occupy the position of one of the complements of a verb.
Ò¢g¡n is a pronoun, i.e. an actant type reciprocal marker: it can combine with postpositions, i.e. fill the positions of indirect and oblique objects; it can function as the first component of a determinative phrase (i.e., a non-adjectival attribute) and as the possessor within a possessive syntagma.
The same marker is also used as a suffix of de-verbal derivation with the reciprocal meaning.
The sociative construction is derived from the reciprocal one through adding the postposition f² (principal meanings: comitative and of agentive complement) to å¢g¡n; the adverbial phrase å¢g¡n f² expresses the meaning ‘together’.

Ce numéro spécial de la revue Nordic Journal of African Studies (vol.9, no. 3)  contient dix articles qui portent sur la formation des maîtres, les attitudes des maîtres vis-à-vis de l’introduction des langues nationales dans l’enseignement, la disponibilité et l’utilisation des manuels, la transition du bambara au français comme médium dans l’enseignement des mathématiques, l’enseignement en classe de la langue bambara ainsi que les résultats de cet enseignement, c’est-à-dire les compétences des enfants en bambara écrit. Un article concerne la scolarisation des filles en milieu rural et un autre, les emprunts du peul au français tels qu’ils apparaissent dans le journal mensuel Kabaaru et tels qu’ils sont reçus par les néo-alphabètes en milieu peul. Tous ces articles sont le résultat de sorties sur le terrain effectuées entre 1997 et 1999, la plupart dans la région de Ségou, un dans la région de Mopti, et un dans les deux régions. Ils sont encadrés par deux articles qui considèrent de manière plus générale les problèmes du système éducatif au Mali. Le premier traite la crise scolaire qui frappe l’école depuis une dizaine d’années : grèves répétées, années blanches ou facultatives, baisse du niveau de l’éducation. Le dernier article fait écho au premier, tout en élargissant le champ d’investigation aux rapports entre l’école et la société sur un plan plus général.

This article provides a brief overview of Daba software package created in the course of building corpora
for Manding languages. Key software features are motivated by the tasks and problems characteristic of many African
languages. The corpus-building model proposed here was initially developed for Bambara Reference Corpus which is
available online and is freely accessible. The morphological analysis procedure and corpus annotation scheme are dis-
cussed in detail. Daba uses a morpheme-based morphological annotation scheme inspired by the interlinear glossed form
of presentation of linguistic examples. A scheme mapping Daba’s morpheme-based morphological information onto tra-
ditional word-based corpus annotation is provided. Since Bambara is characterized by a low level of written language
standardization special attention is paid to the issues of representing variability in corpus annotation.

A model for the development of a corpus-driven spelling dictionary for the Bambara language is described. First, a list of about 4000 lexemes characterized by spelling variability is extracted from an electronic Bambara-French dictionary. At the next stage, a script is applied to determine the number of occurrences of each spelling variant in the Bambara Reference Corpus, separately for the entire Corpus (more than 11 million words) and for its disambiguated subcorpus (about 1.5 million words). Statistics on the diversity of sources and authors are also obtained automatically. The statistical data are then sorted manually into two lists of lexemes: those whose standard spelling can be established statistically, and those requiring evaluation by expert linguists. Some difficult cases are discussed in the paper. At the final stage, a representative expert commission will discuss all those lexemes for which statistical data alone do not suffice to define a standard spelling variant, before taking a final decision on each. The resulting Bambara spelling dictionary will be published electronically and on paper.

Для названий парных частей тела форму без показателя множе-
ственности следует считать не столько сингулярной, сколько «фор-
мой общего числа». Плюральная форма для таких
существительных выражает не столько множественность саму по
себе, сколько «маркированную множественность», чаще всего с се-
мантическим компонентом пассивности/дисфункциональности.