"To Like"

In "Verbs in Present" and "Verbs in the Past", we covered the basics of Bambara verbs. But, you still don't have what you need to say the equivalent of "I like peanut sauce."

In English, we use a normal verb to express the idea of liking or appreciating something. In Bambara, this is typically expressed in different way that translates more literally as "Something is pleasing to me." This means we need to use a qualitative verb and the postposition ye.

To cover how to do this, we're going to go over the following:

• Do a mini-review of qualitative verbs
• Unpack how to use the qualitative verb di and postposition ye to express "to like"
• Discuss the broader benefactive value of ye
• Connect ye to the broader category known as "Formal postpositions"

Qualitative verbs reviewed

As you recall from Chapter 10, qualitative verbs are a special category of words that are used to describe things. To use them you need to use either affirmative predicate marker ka or its negative equivalent man.

For instance:

Julakan ka di

'Jula is pleasing'
(as in, 'Jula is a nice language to speak and learn')

Or:

Bɛnbaliya man ɲi

'Discord is not good'
(as in, "Not getting along isn't good")

Expressing "to like" with di and ye

In Bambara, the concept behind by the verb "to like" is expressed via the qualitative verb di ('pleasing') and the benefactive postposition ye. For instance:

Tigadɛgɛna ka di n ye

'Peanut sauce is pleasing to me'
(as in, 'I like peanut sauce')

Note that this means in Bambara, you typically start your sentence with the thing you like or dislike. For example:

Kɛlɛ man di an ye

''We don't like fighting"
(lit. "Fighting isn't pleasing to us")

Benefactive ye

The postposition ye has a range of uses, but the case of ___ ka/man di __ ye highlights one of its most frequent values: benefactive. Why "benefactive"? Because, in general, it carries a meaning of benefit, even if it can be translated in a range of ways in English. For instance:

À fɔ n ye!

'Say it to me!'
(as in, 'Tell me!')

Or:

Cɛ ye baara ɲuman kɛ an ye

'The man did good work for us'

Formal postpositions (a brief introduction)

To fully understand ye, it is useful to unpack the sub-class of words of which it is a part: formal postpositions. As I covered in Chapter 11 on Situatives, postpositions are akin to English prepositions ("in", "on", "under") except they appear after the noun (e.g., dugu kɔnɔ 'in town' [lit. 'town in']).

Formal postpositions are a special subcategory which do not have clear etymologies and have a wide-range of translations. In reality, it is best NOT to try to give any of the formal postpositions a single word translation in English; instead it's helpful to think in terms of their most typical underlying semantic values.

We have seen two of them already, but here they are all together:

• la: location ('in; on; at')
• fɛ: Fr. chez ('at the place of; by')
• ye: benefit ('for') OR identification
• ma: destination ('to')

These are just rough guidelines. There are other values and in many cases, you can only properly translate formal postpositions in the context of a particular usage or expression.

Case in point, we can build other sentences similar to ___ ka/man di ___ ye using the postposition ma and other qualitative verbs such as gɛlɛn. For instance:

Bamanankan ka gɛlɛn n ma

'Bambara is difficult for me'

But ma can also be used with a regular verb such as ka di ('to give') in a way that is translated differently in English. For instance:

Karamɔgɔ ye kitabu di kalanden ma

'The teacher gave a book to the student'

(NOTE: If you have ever wondered about the name "qualitative verb", this dual usage of postpositions where can they be used both with normal verbs like ka di ('to give') and qualitative verbs like gɛlɛn ('hard; difficult') is actually one of the reasons that qualitative verbs are considered "verbs" despite not behaving like normal verbs otherwise. Both "normal" verbs and qualitative verbs can be used grammatically with postpositions.)

Summary

Ayiwa! In this chapter, we covered the following:

• The idea of "to like" in Bambara is expressed using the qualitative verb di ('pleasing') and the postposition ye
• This means that we start sentences with the thing we like in a sentence that translates more literally to something like, "BLANK is pleasing to me" instead of saying "I like BLANK"

Bamanankan ka di n ye

'I like Bambara'
(lit. 'Bambara is pleasing to me')

• The postposition ye has a range of values, but one of its most frequent ones is the "benefactive"---the idea of something be useful or beneficial for someone
• ye is one of four formal postpositions along side la, fɛ, ma. These postpositions have unclear etymologies and cannot be translated one-to-one with English prepositions.