Surun bɛ ci cogo di?

Intro

In the following video, I ask people in Bamako, Mali about the "verbal gesture" which is known as a surun, suuru or suruntu in Bambara.

Put simply, it is the "the gesture of drawing air through the teeth and into the mouth to produce a loud sucking sound” which is used to express “disgust, defiance, disapproval, disappointment, frustration or impatience' (Rickford & Rickford, 1976).

The noun surun is easily translated one-to-one into French these days with the word tchip.

In English, I am most familiar with the term "suck-teeth" or the expression "kissing/sucking your teeth".

That said, there are range of other names that are used in various parts of the global Black community and diaspora, which line up grammatically better with surun and/or tchip.

The video is roughly two question segments of Episode 8 of Na baro kè.

Watch

Watch the video without the subtitles. If they are on, click on the little "CC" symbol and turn them off.

Watch and Read

Now turn on the subtitles in Bambara/Jula (click on the little "CC" button) and read along.

If you are lost, you can also switch it into English and then re-watch in Bambara/Jula.

And remember, you can also slow down the video to make it easier to follow along. I recommend 75%. Click on the little gear symbol.

List of Selected Grammar Points

• Expressing "To each, their X" with Bɛɛ n'i ka X

Grammar Points Explained

• Expressing "To each, their X" with Bɛɛ n'i ka X

  In the video, we hear the following sentence:

  Bɛɛ n'i ka faamucogo don

  "All (people) and their way of understanding it is"

  (as in, "To each, their own way of understanding" or more colloquially, "Everyone has their own way of understanding [so-and-so]")

  If we boil this sentence down to its basic grammar, we have the following:

  Bɛɛ ni i ka X

  "All and their X"

  Notice that in this sentence, the word i does not translate to "you" or "your" in English. Instead it translates best as "they" or "their".

  This is because i is being used as a generic pronoun that like bɛɛ ('all') refers to people in general.

  This usage of i shows up occasionally. It's particular prevalent in proverbs or general statements about people in general that that involve the word bɛɛ beforehand. Many of them involve the same sentence structure of out initial sentence:

  Bɛɛ n'i ka X

  The most faithful-to-English translation for this structure that I can think of is something like "To each, their X" (e.g., "To each, their own"). This can sound a bit old-fashioned, but the meaning behind it is something like this: "Every person has their X", where X can be any noun.

  For example:

  Bɛɛ n'i hakilila

  "To each, their opinion"

  Or:

  Bɛɛ n'i faso

  "To each, their homeland"

  (NOTE: In some cases, you may hear or see this expression pronounced with na instead of ni. For instance, Bɛɛ na i faso instead of Bɛɛ ni i faso.)