Bambara , also known as Bamana ( N'Ko script : ߓߡߊߣߊ߲ ) or Bamanankan (N'Ko script: ߓߡߊߣߊ߲ߞߊ߲ ; Arabic script : بَمَنَنكَن ), is a lingua franca and national language of Mali spoken by perhaps 14 million people, natively by 4.2 million Bambara people and about 10 million second-language users. It is estimated that about 80 percent of the population of Mali speak Bambara as a first or second language. It has a subject–object–verb clause structure and two lexical tones .
42-478: Ménaka ( Bambara : ߡߋߣߊߞߊ ߘߌߣߋߖߊ tr. Menaka Dineja) is a region of Mali legislatively created in 2012 from the cercle of the same name previously part of Gao Region . Actual implementation of the region began on 19 January 2016 with the appointment of Daouda Maïga as the region's governor. Members of the region's transitional council were appointed on 14 October 2016. The region is divided into four cercles: Andéramboukane , Inékar , Tidermène , and Ménaka ,
84-583: A "cultureless people" since prior to this time there had been no indigenous African writing system for his language. N'ko first gained a strong user base around the Maninka-speaking area of Kante's hometown of Kankan, Guinea and disseminated from there into other Manding-speaking parts of West Africa. N'ko and the Arabic script are still in use for Bambara, although only the Latin-based orthography
126-473: A , b , etc. This is sometimes called ASCIIbetical order . This deviates from the standard alphabetical order, particularly due to the ordering of capital letters before all lower-case ones (and possibly the treatment of spaces and other non-letter characters). It is therefore often applied with certain alterations, the most obvious being case conversion (often to uppercase, for historical reasons ) before comparison of ASCII values. In many collation algorithms,
168-494: A collation method typically defines a total order on a set of possible identifiers, called sort keys, which consequently produces a total preorder on the set of items of information (items with the same identifier are not placed in any defined order). A collation algorithm such as the Unicode collation algorithm defines an order through the process of comparing two given character strings and deciding which should come before
210-562: A little bit of Bambara I you tɛna AUX . NEG . FUT dumuni eating ke do wa? Q I tɛna dumuni ke wa? you AUX.NEG.FUT eating do Q Aren't you going to eat? Du Mara Dou Mara be still ameriki America hali in Collation Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order , or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation
252-431: A means of labeling items that are already ordered. For example, pages, sections, chapters, and the like, as well as the items of lists, are frequently "numbered" in this way. Labeling series that may be used include ordinary Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, ...), Roman numerals (I, II, III, ... or i, ii, iii, ...), or letters (A, B, C, ... or a, b, c, ...). (An alternative method for indicating list items, without numbering them,
294-606: A palatal nasal; the ny spelling is kept for the combination of a nasal vowel with a subsequent oral palatal glide. Following the 1966 Bamako spelling conventions, a velar nasal " ŋ " is written as " ŋ ", although in early publications it was often transcribed as ng or nk . The N'Ko ( N'Ko : ߒߞߏ ) alphabet is a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Manding languages of West Africa; N’Ko means 'I say' in all Manding languages. Kante created N’Ko in response to what he felt were beliefs that Africans were
336-550: A result, logographic languages often supplement radical-and-stroke ordering with alphabetic sorting of a phonetic conversion of the logographs. For example, the kanji word Tōkyō (東京) can be sorted as if it were spelled out in the Japanese characters of the hiragana syllabary as "to-u-ki- yo -u" (とうきょう), using the conventional sorting order for these characters. In addition, Chinese characters can also be sorted by stroke-based sorting . In Greater China, surname stroke ordering
378-479: A roughly similar procedure, though this will often be done unconsciously. Other advantages are that one can easily find the first or last elements on the list (most likely to be useful in the case of numerically sorted data), or elements in a given range (useful again in the case of numerical data, and also with alphabetically ordered data when one may be sure of only the first few letters of the sought item or items). Strings representing numbers may be sorted based on
420-527: A total number of 21 vowels (the letters approximate their IPA equivalents). Writing with the Latin alphabet began during the French colonization, and the first orthography was introduced in 1967. Literacy is limited, especially in rural areas. Although written literature is only slowly evolving (due to the predominance of French as the "language of the educated"), there exists a wealth of oral literature , which
462-461: Is subject–object–verb (SOV). Take the phrase, n t'a lon (I don't know [it]). n is the subject (I), a is the object (it), and [ta] lon is the verb ([to] know). The t' is from the negative present tense marker té , bé being the affirmative present tense marker ( n b'a don would mean "I know it"). Like many SOV languages, Bambara uses postpositions rather than prepositions - their role being similar to English prepositions but placed after
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#1732764894350504-417: Is a bit more difficult, because different locales use different symbols for a decimal point , and sometimes the same character used as a decimal point is also used as a separator, for example "Section 3.2.5". There is no universal answer for how to sort such strings; any rules are application dependent. In some contexts, numbers and letters are used not so much as a basis for establishing an ordering, but as
546-439: Is a convention in some official documents where people's names are listed without hierarchy. When information is stored in digital systems, collation may become an automated process. It is then necessary to implement an appropriate collation algorithm that allows the information to be sorted in a satisfactory manner for the application in question. Often the aim will be to achieve an alphabetical or numerical ordering that follows
588-409: Is a fundamental element of most office filing systems , library catalogs , and reference books . Collation differs from classification in that the classes themselves are not necessarily ordered. However, even if the order of the classes is irrelevant, the identifiers of the classes may be members of an ordered set, allowing a sorting algorithm to arrange the items by class. Formally speaking,
630-574: Is deemed to come first; for example, "cart" comes before "carthorse".) The result of arranging a set of strings in alphabetical order is that words with the same first letter are grouped together, and within such a group words with the same first two letters are grouped together, and so on. Capital letters are typically treated as equivalent to their corresponding lowercase letters. (For alternative treatments in computerized systems, see Automated collation , below.) Certain limitations, complications, and special conventions may apply when alphabetical order
672-460: Is desired to order text with embedded numbers using proper numerical order. For example, "Figure 7b" goes before "Figure 11a", even though '7' comes after '1' in Unicode . This can be extended to Roman numerals . This behavior is not particularly difficult to produce as long as only integers are to be sorted, although it can slow down sorting significantly. For example, Microsoft Windows does this when sorting file names . Sorting decimals properly
714-406: Is formed by attaching a vocalic suffix -u , most often with a low tone (in the orthography, -w ) to nouns or adjectives. In urban areas, many Bamanankan conjunctions have been replaced in everyday use by French borrowings that often mark code-switches . The Bamako dialect makes use of sentences like: N taara Kita mais il n'y avait personne là-bas. : I went to Kita [Bamanankan ] but there
756-682: Is officially recognized in Mali. Additionally, a script known as Masaba or Ma-sa-ba was developed for the language beginning in 1930 by Woyo Couloubayi ( c. 1910 -1982) of Assatiémala . Named for the first characters in Couloubayi's preferred collation order, Masaba is a syllabary which uses diacritics to indicate vowel qualities such as tone , length , and nasalization . Though not conclusively demonstrated to be related to other writing systems, Masaba appears to draw on traditional Bambara iconography and shares some similarities with
798-494: Is often tales of kings and heroes. This oral literature is mainly passed on by the griots ( Jeliw in Bambara) who are a mixture of storytellers , praise singers, and human history books who have studied the trade of singing and reciting for many years. Many of their songs are very old and are said to date back to the old empire of Mali. Each consonant represents a single sound with some exceptions: The basic sentence structure
840-617: Is particularly common when using French words which have a meaning not traditionally found in Mali. For example, the Bamanankan word for snow is niegei , based on the French word for snow neige . As there has never been snow in Mali, there was no unique word in Bamanankan to describe it. N I bɛ AUX . positive bamanankan Bambara mɛn hear dɔɔni-dɔɔni small-small N bɛ bamanankan mɛn dɔɔni-dɔɔni I AUX. positive Bambara hear small-small I understand/hear
882-861: Is the Unicode Collation Algorithm . This can be adapted to use the appropriate collation sequence for a given language by tailoring its default collation table. Several such tailorings are collected in Common Locale Data Repository . In some applications, the strings by which items are collated may differ from the identifiers that are displayed. For example, The Shining might be sorted as Shining, The (see Alphabetical order above), but it may still be desired to display it as The Shining . In this case two sets of strings can be stored, one for display purposes, and another for collation purposes. Strings used for collation in this way are called sort keys . Sometimes, it
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#1732764894350924-421: Is the basis for many systems of collation where items of information are identified by strings consisting principally of letters from an alphabet . The ordering of the strings relies on the existence of a standard ordering for the letters of the alphabet in question. (The system is not limited to alphabets in the strict technical sense; languages that use a syllabary or abugida , for example Cherokee , can use
966-462: Is to use a bulleted list .) When letters of an alphabet are used for this purpose of enumeration , there are certain language-specific conventions as to which letters are used. For example, the Russian letters Ъ and Ь (which in writing are only used for modifying the preceding consonant ), and usually also Ы , Й , and Ё , are omitted. Also in many languages that use extended Latin script ,
1008-469: Is used for collation. For example, the Chinese character 妈 (meaning "mother") is sorted as a six-stroke character under the three-stroke primary radical 女. The radical-and-stroke system is cumbersome compared to an alphabetical system in which there are a few characters, all unambiguous. The choice of which components of a logograph comprise separate radicals and which radical is primary is not clear-cut. As
1050-432: Is used: In several languages the rules have changed over time, and so older dictionaries may use a different order than modern ones. Furthermore, collation may depend on use. For example, German dictionaries and telephone directories use different approaches. Some Arabic dictionaries, such as Hans Wehr 's bilingual A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic , group and sort Arabic words by semitic root . For example,
1092-655: The Alphabetical order article. Such algorithms are potentially quite complex, possibly requiring several passes through the text. Problems are nonetheless still common when the algorithm has to encompass more than one language. For example, in German dictionaries the word ökonomisch comes between offenbar and olfaktorisch , while Turkish dictionaries treat o and ö as different letters, placing oyun before öbür . A standard algorithm for collating any collection of strings composed of any standard Unicode symbols
1134-644: The Vai syllabary of Liberia and with Arabic-derived secret alphabets used in Hodh (now Hodh El Gharbi and Hodh Ech Chargui Regions of Mauritania ). As of 1978, Masaba was in limited use in several communities in Nioro Cercle for accounting, personal correspondence, and the recording of Muslim prayers; the script's current status and prevalence is unknown. It uses seven vowels a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ and u, each of which can be nasalized, pharyngealized and murmured, giving
1176-453: The hanzi of Chinese and the kanji of Japanese , whose thousands of symbols defy ordering by convention. In this system, common components of characters are identified; these are called radicals in Chinese and logographic systems derived from Chinese. Characters are then grouped by their primary radical, then ordered by number of pen strokes within radicals. When there is no obvious radical or more than one radical, convention governs which
1218-537: The northeast of Mopti (especially Bɔrɛ); Zegedugu, Bɛndugu, Bakɔkan, Jɔnka (southeast). Since 1967, Bambara has mostly been written in the Latin script , using some additional phonetic characters from the Africa Alphabet . The vowels are a, e, ɛ (formerly è ) , i, o, ɔ (formerly ò ) , u ; accents can be used to indicate tonality. The former digraph ny is now written ɲ when it designates
1260-476: The French word for yellow, they often use joni .) However, one could also say: I ka kulosi ye nɛrɛmukuman ye , also meaning "your skirt is yellow." The original Bamanankan word for yellow comes from " nɛrɛmuku ," being flour ( muku ) made from néré (locust bean), a seed from a long seed pod. Nɛrɛmuku is often used in sauces in Southern Mali. Most French loan words are suffixed with the sound 'i'; this
1302-407: The basic principles of alphabetical ordering (mathematically speaking, lexicographical ordering ). So a computer program might treat the characters a , b , C , d , and $ as being ordered $ , C , a , b , d (the corresponding ASCII codes are $ = 36, a = 97, b = 98, C = 67, and d = 100). Therefore, strings beginning with C , M , or Z would be sorted before strings with lower-case
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1344-564: The comparison is based not on the numerical codes of the characters, but with reference to the collating sequence – a sequence in which the characters are assumed to come for the purpose of collation – as well as other ordering rules appropriate to the given application. This can serve to apply the correct conventions used for alphabetical ordering in the language in question, dealing properly with differently cased letters, modified letters , digraphs , particular abbreviations, and so on, as mentioned above under Alphabetical order , and in detail in
1386-580: The countries Burkina Faso , Senegal , Guinea-Bissau , Guinea , Liberia , Ivory Coast and the Gambia . Manding is part of the larger Mandé family of languages. Bambara is spoken throughout Mali as a lingua franca. The language is most widely spoken in the areas east, south, and north of Bamako, where native speakers and/or those that identify as members of the Bambara ethnic group are most densely populated. These regions are also usually considered to be
1428-485: The historical geographical origin of Bambara people, particularly Ségou , after diverging from other Manding groups. The main dialect is Standard Bamara, which has significant influence from Maninkakan. Bambara has many local dialects: Kaarta, Tambacounda (west); Beledugu, Bananba, Mesekele (north); Jitumu, Jamaladugu, Segu (center); Cakadugu, Keleyadugu, Jalakadougu, Kurulamini, Banimɔncɛ, Cɛmala, Cɛndugu, Baninkɔ, Shɛndugu, Ganadugu (south); Kala, Kuruma, Saro, dialects to
1470-539: The location of the capital, also called Ménaka . This Mali location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Bambara language Bambara is a variety of a group of closely related languages called Manding , whose native speakers trace their cultural history to the medieval Mali Empire . Varieties of Manding are generally considered (among native speakers) to be mutually intelligible – dependent on exposure or familiarity with dialects between speakers – and spoken by 9.1 million people in
1512-421: The noun. The language has two (mid/standard and high) tones ; e.g. sa 'die' vs. sá 'snake.' The typical argument structure of the language consists of a subject, followed by an aspectival auxiliary, followed by the direct object, and finally a transitive verb. Bambara does not inflect for gender. Gender for a noun can be specified by adding a suffix, -cɛ or -kɛ for male and -muso for female. The plural
1554-437: The other. When an order has been defined in this way, a sorting algorithm can be used to put a list of any number of items into that order. The main advantage of collation is that it makes it fast and easy for a user to find an element in the list, or to confirm that it is absent from the list. In automatic systems this can be done using a binary search algorithm or interpolation search ; manual searching may be performed using
1596-459: The same ordering principle provided there is a set ordering for the symbols used.) To decide which of two strings comes first in alphabetical order, initially their first letters are compared. The string whose first letter appears earlier in the alphabet comes first in alphabetical order. If the first letters are the same, then the second letters are compared, and so on, until the order is decided. (If one string runs out of letters to compare, then it
1638-441: The standard criteria as described in the preceding sections. However, not all of these criteria are easy to automate. The simplest kind of automated collation is based on the numerical codes of the symbols in a character set , such as ASCII coding (or any of its supersets such as Unicode ), with the symbols being ordered in increasing numerical order of their codes, and this ordering being extended to strings in accordance with
1680-489: The values of the numbers that they represent. For example, "−4", "2.5", "10", "89", "30,000". Pure application of this method may provide only a partial ordering on the strings, since different strings can represent the same number (as with "2" and "2.0" or, when scientific notation is used, "2e3" and "2000"). A similar approach may be taken with strings representing dates or other items that can be ordered chronologically or in some other natural fashion. Alphabetical order
1722-401: The words kitāba ( كتابة 'writing'), kitāb ( كتاب 'book'), kātib ( كاتب 'writer'), maktaba ( مكتبة 'library'), maktab ( مكتب 'office'), maktūb ( مكتوب 'fate,' or 'written'), are agglomerated under the triliteral root k - t - b ( ك ت ب ), which denotes 'writing'. Another form of collation is radical-and-stroke sorting , used for non-alphabetic writing systems such as
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1764-478: Was no one there [French]. The sentence in Bamanankan alone would be Ń taara Kita nka mɔkɔ si tun tɛ yen. The French proposition "est-ce que" is also used in Bamanankan ;; however, it is pronounced more slowly and as three syllables, [ɛsikə] . Bamanankan uses many French loan words. For example, some people might say: I ka kurusi ye nere ye : "Your skirt is yellow" (using a derivation of jaune ,
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